MARIE DE VILLEPIN

Marie de Villepin in conversation with curator Françoise Marquet.

Marie, this is the first time you are showing your work. You have chosen a Parisian gallery in St. Germain-des-Prés. How did you come to painting and what drew you to this form of expression?

Painting has always been a constant for me. In a life of travel and change I always have a pencil and notebooks on me. To use a notebook is a way of capturing the colour of a moment, an emotion. It’s also a way of warding off the sheer dizziness I feel at the fragility of things, the passing of lives and of time… of giving form to encounters and the oscillations of my emotions.

These notebooks relate the origins of my musical writing. I associate certain colours with certain chords, I string together images and enliven them with words, stories that may turn into the lyrics of songs.

So, what with cinema, music and painting, how did you come to put painting at the centre of your life?

To me it feels perfectly natural. Fashion, cinema and music are different ways of expressing the same things. These worlds have allowed me to train my eye, to hone my tastes, to try and create beauty and, most of all, to understand the sheer amount of collective work that goes into these disciplines. The power of fashion, as I see it, is that it’s like silent movies: there’s the framing, the shadows, the light, the speed. A very particular way of elevating the image. Most importantly, all these different experiences helped me to make choices. 

In painting there is more than one way of being right. You’re looking for the same thing as in music: harmony. What I’d like to get across in painting is that form of relative rightness, the “blue note.” Painting has a lot of things in common with these worlds, but it adds the feeling of freedom and, paradoxically, of being in control of what you do. You’re always on your own facing the canvas. I’ve learned to love this face-to-face with myself which allows me, wherever I am, to let my imagination run free, to have complete independence.

There is another point that all these disciplines share: they involve the whole body, they fuse body and mind. This is something that’s often forgotten in painting, because people give a vision that is too cerebral, too intellectual. In fact, art is always an art of the body. You paint with your whole body. It’s the only instrument we have for feeling, for acting. In my everyday life, the work gives me a kind of discipline. It soothes. That’s why sport is also very important for me, as preparation for painting.

You remember what Zao Wou-ki used to say: “painting is a physical business.” He played tennis four times a week and had a pretty fair ranking.

You were born in Washington and you live between New York and Paris. You have lived in India and in recent years you have never stopped travelling. Has that influenced your painting, and has it really helped you?

Being abroad always means being two people. There’s a risk of losing sight of yourself, but you also have a chance of finding yourself. Especially when you find yourself living alone in a city like New York at a very young age. I have long been fascinated by the violence of big American or Asian cities, by the violence both of the spaces and the people. Some paintings, like Just do IT and Bye Bye Johnny, owe a great deal to the time I spent in New York and Los Angeles. They try to capture something of that electricity, of the free rhythm you find in American cities. The painting What’s the deal also echoes that electricity. I made it in New York in a small apartment in the East Village where I was living at the time. It was an old building and very poorly soundproofed and I was constantly being assailed by all the conversations and noises of my different neighbours doing their living. I learned to live with all these mysteriously aimed voices off. They inspired me to make this edgy tower of letters, the inkjet and colours spreading like a spider’s web, but leaving this question apparent at the heart of it all: “What is going on here?”

In trying to confront that hardness, that fierceness, I realised that there was a part of me that aspired to something else.

I believe that we have a need to find refuges for ourselves. Inside a painting, I don't hear just one voice. There are several, capable of dialogue, of daring but also humility, of correcting themselves, and that’s why I like sketches so much, fragments, which show but don’t reveal everything, which don’t make it look as if you can reduce the world to a single image.

What strikes me is how different my paintings are, depending on the place where they were conceived. For me it’s as if the drawings I made in the United States and Europe are such strangers to each other that I’m looking at the two different hemispheres of my life. I’d like to be able to widen that horizon even more, to see what it would be like to make work in China, where art is incredibly alive today; to see what it would be like to make work in Morocco, a country I really love where the light is unique, similar to what you get in California but almost even bolder. What we write, what we paint is intimately linked to a place, to the earth, to the land, to a climate, to a voice, to people. These are things that we store up.

Who are the people, the artists who have most inspired you?

I have always been guided by gratitude. That’s what I feel when I experience paintings, music and poems that just sound right all of a sudden. That’s what happens when I see works by Pollock or also Basquiat, Schiele or Simon Hantaï. But the effect is just as powerful when it’s the drawings of Unica Zürn – that incredible meticulousness that she uses to put her gaze, her ideas in order. I need them so that each day I can keep moving forward. And I prefer to follow these feelings rather than some school or other. I feel gratitude towards some very diverse artists for having opened a new window onto the world, for giving me a glimpse of new worlds and spaces. My way of reworking certain images seen in particular paintings, for example, in the Six Etudes pour piano-q=96, a homage to Philip Glass, is precisely that, an exercise in gratitude. 

I also feel gratitude for the artists I’ve been lucky enough to meet, whom I’ve seen working and constantly possessed by their art. My family has always been fascinated by the arts and by artists, and that’s how I came to meet some very remarkable people. Meeting Zao Wou-ki, that giant of world painting, or again Anselm Kiefer, Miquel Barceló and Yan Pei-Ming, had an incredible impact on me. For example, Zao Wou-ki gave me what you need when you’re a teenager: a model, an ideal of life, the feeling that there is a path. What I create, I know that I owe it to all these artists I have met and who gave me a little bit of their energy. You never create alone.

In your work one gets the impression of an oscillation between figuration and a reaching for abstraction. In these paintings you’re exhibiting, do you think these two forms of expression can work together? Are you deliberately playing on the frontier between them?

I don’t know, those aren’t necessarily the terms in which I think about the question. What I’m really trying to do is fix on the canvas or the paper a living trace, something out of which I can compose a story. As Zao Wou-ki used to say, I’m looking for a new way of seeing things differently. In the end, whether or not this trace is a recognised form doesn’t matter much. It is what brought me to these “new creatures.” 

Life is animated form in its raw state, invented or again hybrid. It is the world we now live in. We are constantly surprised or even aggressed by new forms, by new mixtures of nature and technology, by new identities that sometimes provoke fear or rejection. My aim is to gradually tame these new creatures in order to make them more fraternal for us. 

I believe much more in the harmony of colours than in the meaning of the figure. In each of my paintings I try to imprint a specific sound track. I would like people to be able to look at my painting the way they read a score, with notes that, placed end to end, give rise to an inner music. My notebooks are full of drawings done to the rhythm of the songs and music I was listening to. Often, in fact, it is pieces of music that give my works their titles. I have the impression that it’s a way of transcribing authentic moments, of keeping and sharing them. As in music, motifs are repeated, sound alternates with silence, a rhythm imparts a texture, transforms the space. Whether or not there is a subject to start with, the painting takes on a life of its own and seeks a path simply so that it can give pleasure to the gaze.

Beyond the question of abstraction and figuration, I also believe that each painting is a problem to be solved. We are confronted with the paper or the canvas. There are several possible paths. You can find a solution, as one would find a solution to an equation. I have always been particularly attracted to clarity, speed and science. I am fascinated by the new relations between science and the arts that are possible in today’s fast changing world.

Your titles are often enigmatic, sometimes a bit ironic, always between two languages. What role do they play in your work?

The titles are like a caption, but not necessarily a truth. They fix a story, a moment. They remind me of the context in which I painted it. Each painting has a place of origin, each also has its own language. But the paintings to not belong to them, they’re just a prop, sometimes a handle to grasp them by. Some refer to music I was listening to when I was working and that was an important part of the inspiration – for example, Gaspard, when I was listening to Gaspard de la Nuit by Ravel. Others attach the imagination to a place, to the caves at Lascaux in Petroglyphs or again Chamber of the Felines, or again Coral Reef. 

Most of the works in the show are on paper, but often prepared in an original way, and with a great range of media. What importance do you attach to the choice of supports and media? Can you see an evolution in your work? What are you working on at the moment?

It’s true, I do take particular pleasure in handling paper, in touching it and seeing it change. It is the absolute white page, which can become at once a poem, a painting, a print, a score. I love its texture, its fragility. Often, I take a long time to choose it, to prepare it. There is incredible variety in paper’s fibre, as if it already contained the seeds of all the world’s diversity. No two sheets of paper are identical, so that creates a kind of dialogue with the material. I experienced this, for example, with banana leaf, which gives you very different sensations when you draw. 

I try to multiply these possibilities by exploring as many different media as I can: pencil, graphite, pastels, collage, and, more and more oil painting, which is more demanding and requires lengthy preparation on paper, with several layers of sizing and priming, yet keeps its fragility, its uniqueness. At the moment I’m spending more time painting on canvas. That’s more intimidating in some ways, but it allows you to work in larger formats, which interests and attracts me.

In a world where violence is everywhere, can painting play a pacifying role, or is its role more to transgress?

We are born in violence, we die in violence. It is part of us. Music is violence that perforates the air. Painting can sometimes tear open space. By accepting violence and trying to capture it, we can try to liberate ourselves from it and sublimate and make it serve life. For me the hand and the pencil are tools for reproducing and channelling that violence. Take the work Fresco, for example. The question guides the hand, its research. Sometimes, I had the feeling that the gesture had split from my consciousness and was expressing a state of mind, almost in spite of myself. In such situations, you abandon yourself to the paper.