“And what if we looked at painting…”

An interview with Beate E. Renner. Conducted by Bernard Goy, Director of the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain (FRAC), in Île-de-France, Paris, 2001.

B.G. :

Let's continue the conversation we began at the start of your travels along the Silk Road. When I reread the text I once wrote about it (“The Southeast Passage ") and when I look at this latest painting (“Little Souls Everywhere”), I can't help but ask: How do you relate the space in your painting to the space you go in search of on your distant voyages? Your destinations are mostly not great capital cities, but rather islands or peninsulas?

B.R. :

Showing your paintings in places like the Maldives, the Sultanate of Oman, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia means confronting other mentalities, other spaces, and that necessarily changes your perception of reality. I feel as if I've rediscovered greater materiality in painting through these exhibitions and this whole project. And when I say “materiality, I mean an ‘enchanted’ materiality. In other words, a sense of poetry that I strive to find and ‘create’ in art, that I have finally found in something very simple that I easily put or bring together. I've become more aware of what I do. My paintings have gained substance. A sense of depth that does not require perspective: depth that is created by other means. Sometimes it's very physical; it demands a great deal of presence and physical effort. And then there are the conversations that I have had and all of that has affected me bodily and thus finds expression in my painting.

B.G. :

But isn't there also a stronger sense of space, rendered more evident by the fact that one is going into the unknown, to a space where the difference between our customs and our cultural reflexes and those of the people we are going to meet becomes even more apparent?

B.R. :

Absolutely. It's the unknown. And to avoid falling into the trap of exoticism, I have to fill this space that opens onto the unknown. When you go into an unknown space, you are compelled to look at things differently. You put enormous pressure on yourself, but you can cope with this pressure a lot more freely, or easily, because there are no expectations to live up to, because you are not hindered by barriers, the concepts of your own culture. The unknown therefore becomes a new place. And afterwards it's amazing: something exists that did not exist before.

B.G. :

Moreover, in this painting, there are different planes, or registers, and the relationship between them effectively creates a space. I like your use of the term “easily”: it implies gestures, the expression of the body....

B.R. :

Yes, but there are nevertheless limits. I don't believe in infinity. You have to put things into a framework, you have to set a boundary somewhere on this adventure.

B.G. :

I agree. So your painting does not really seek anymore for the metaphysical infinity of Abstract Expressionism for example. Here, on the other hand, one can feel the presence of the earth, nature and a relatively identifiable space but without a sky.

B.R. :

True. You will see that many of the other paintings look like close-ups, in a film. As if I'd chosen to go deep into the experience, deep into the canvas in order to relive a feeling by physically marking it, in order to reaffirm a meaning... These paintings are landscapes, in fact. Yes, half-abstract, half-figurative landscapes. But the horizon is in the depth. There's no distant horizon stretching towards infinity, not even a hint of it. It's the brushwork itself that enables the painter, the spectator, to find this opening in the depth of the painting.
Actually, it's a painting which uses the landscape genre to help me rediscover and affirm my singularity, to dig deeper into it.

B.G. :

They are quite luxuriant, quite dense landscapes. There's nothing desert-like about them. They are full of life, movement, vegetation and formal presence. And thus, without going as far to be anecdotal, there is also something of a rediscovered vivacity in these paintings. You often use the word “rediscover”. The East is impregnated with symbolism. In all mystical traditions, for example, the essential meaning comes from the East. The East is always the source, where, of course, the sun rises, etc. What I also find interesting in your painting, is this to-and-from movement. When you set off on a journey, it's a real departure, a departure towards something very different. But doesn't this departure also have a sense of going back to something? Isn't it also a return to something that is missing, something to do with an original source which has to be rediscovered in any case?

B.R. :

Yes, I could say that it is the project's very purpose. By going East, I've rediscovered the West. But a more conspicuous West, which belongs to me again. I feel much less dispossessed than I did before, more deeply rooted. My travelling has had a sort of ataractic effect on my painting. Something which proclaims: it's there, here and now and it matters little what YOU think about it. It's the painting itself that is embodied, that becomes apparent and speaks for itself.

B.G. :

So it's not a question of searching for a lost paradise?

B.R. :

Far from it. I don't believe in paradise. The here and now is enough for me. But I want to grasp it fully with both hands. I want to possess it, by my own means. I don't want it to be given to me by proxy.
Perhaps that's the goal of painting, of art: not affirming one's subjectivity, but rather one's singularity.
That reminds me of Peter Sloterdijk, a German thinker. In one of his books, he talks about how the West is suffering from being tired of the world. He more or less says that this fatigue is caused by our legacy from the 19th century, by its historicism; this 19th century about which sentimental side we often laugh about… In fact, we are the direct result of all that. And in painting, one may even say that an avant-garde approach is simply the inverse side of a historical attitude. But it is not tantamount to being free of this attitude.

B.G. :

What you're saying is very interesting because one may consider that the relationship today between painting and contemporary art is a highly complex one. In my opinion, all current attitudes are interesting. But most of the people involved in art today no longer know how to position painting in the face of the dichotomy that you have summed up so well, which stems, on the one hand, from tradition and, on the other hand, from the objections raised by the avant-gardists who are themselves defined by the tradition they are reacting against.

B.R. :

So this reaction is thus the inverted or mirror image of tradition?

B.G. :

That's right, the negative or inverted image. As a result, one effectively attains a certain nihilism, an absence of meaning and even a rejection of meaning. I would like to quote a line by Walt Whitman, which I think applies here: “I exist as I am, that is enough.” And that's the hardest position to maintain today, but it's also the only one possible.
And it's also the one I discern in your painting. A sort of purity perceived in the artistic gesture. Although these exhibitions were invisible to a certain section of the Parisian public, they were very visible elsewhere, because they were really seen instead of being identified through filters, avant-garde ideologies, or, conversely, historicism.
People say one should be initiated in contemporary art, one should be more informed about it… But when standing in front of your paintings, I think one should work on looking at what one can see, rather than identifying the forms and automatically relating them to a ready-made school of thought.
This idea of travelling back and forth brings another question to mind: Going away like that, on several occasions, is something that could be easily put into a category which exists today in contemporary art and culture in general – “nomadism”. It's a word that often recurs, nomadic thought, etc. And you mentioned feeling more deeply “rooted”, a term that is used much less frequently. Simone Weil wrote a book about that subject in the 1930s; it argued against a reactionary, nostalgic vision of tradition and against an angelic vision of modernity. It was a very pertinent book in that respect.
So how do you explain, in relation to your painting and to your journeys, the paradox between your nonetheless nomadic approach and the way you speak of: “I rediscovered, I was searching for, I feel more deeply rooted”?

B.R. :

You spoke before of “nihilism”. We all live in the modern era and in the present. It would be ridiculous and naive to claim one can avoid this modernity and the atmosphere emanating from it. Each of us has to cope with this nihilism. I think that what I do in my painting, since I bear witness to my era all the same, is ‘condense’ the agitated, tumultuous aspect. I ‘condense’ it by the way I reframe it, and this reframing functions through my moving around. What did the avant-gardes do to go beyond this nihilism? They accelerated it, they intensified the feeling of it. Nowadays, the only credible avant-gardism would be a work of art that is different from one created the day before. That means that yesterday's work of art is already obsolete. But by doing that, one obliterates the world. The world becomes invisible.
Yet I think this rapidity is present in my canvases, but I would say that I control it, I control it through depth. I condense all that, and in doing so, stabilize it, appropriate it and anchor myself, despite this apparent sense of movement.
I am not a nomad, I'm a sedentary person. I only use travelling and moving around to better put down roots.

B.G. :

And yet your painting really works on the surface.
Thus there is also this relationship with the body in your painting, which is evidently problematic too.
What, in fact, gives this feeling of presence or, should we say, of continuance of the body at work, of movement? How can one find that in your painting? I feel there is a presence but that it is not easy to formulate.

B.R. :

Look at the brushwork, you can see all the movement. It's, among other things, the fruit of muscular effort. And when you look at it, with your eyes, you are forced to retranscribe it and it affects your own muscular system too. You can feel the dynamics though perhaps not consciously. It's a kind of transference. It has the same effect as superposition. Look at this painting (“Fields”): you said there was a lot of movement, agitation, etc. in my work. And what is a human body? The interaction between different organs, different bodily liquids, muscles, etc. It's a bit like that. The dynamism is rendered partly by the movement of the brushwork and partly by the composition itself.
The basic composition in my paintings is, a priori, very stable; but then there are a few lines which create the overall dynamic. Colour or the relationship between the colours adds more dynamism. But it's all intuitive. Of course, I have a certain amount of experience, I look at and have looked at a great number of paintings, but I never quite know how a canvas will turn out when I start working on it.
Over the years, I've gained self-assurance. I trust myself on this adventure called painting. I also accept making mistakes. Botching isn't important. It's rather like a genetic accident: something interesting may come of it. So I also like the notion of risk in painting, in my painting, at any rate. And after a day, or on rarer occasions, a night's painting, I feel exhausted. But it's a tiredness that comes hand in hand with very intense mental activity. It energizes my whole nervous system. And then there's the light.
Let's look at these two paintings now, “Land” and “Sea”.

B.G. :

One could play around with the words and interpret them as Landing and Seeing.

B.R. :

Absolutely. In fact, landing is a recurrent theme in my painting. Take “Free Fall”, for example. And there's a sensation of landing in this work too.

B.G. :

Exactly. There's perhaps a temporality about it which is common to all painting, a temporality that I would link to the idea that a real voyage is always made by boat. Isn't there a rather terrestrial view of life, of the world, of space, in these paintings? In other words, a view on a human scale and not on a ‘supersonic’ or ‘cyberspatial’ scale?

B.R. :

I like the expression “on a human scale”. I have spoken about making things “worldly” on several occasions. But that's exactly it. We have to discover what's real amidst all this vaporization of reality, we have to somehow rediscover earthly reality.
We have to rediscover our soul and mind in our body, in our senses, in our way of looking at things and in our muscles.

B.G. :

This relationship to the earth may seem totally anachronistic if one puts oneself in the context of urban life in Paris, London, or New York, and in the present-day artistic context. Art today is often a commentary on society; the scope and problematics of many contemporary works are limited to social, political and economic relationships.
Curiously enough, some of the people in the news today who would have been regarded as completely out of sync a few years ago are today important figures, because they have made us realize that we need to establish a new relationship with the earth, with the solid ground beneath our feet, with our life support system.
What relationship can your painting thus establish using the landscape genre? Why have you chosen to move closer to landscape instead of to urban life? There's a whole school of non-figurative painting relating to urban life, in New York, for example, in post-geometric art and such like.
In your work, this relationship is conveyed by non-figurative painting. There's a certain abstractness that nevertheless relates to elementary things such as the earth and the sea.

B.R. :

In fact, I would like to do a painting of a big city, of urban life. After all, cities put down roots too, into the ground, into a site. But there's so much speed, so many superimposed signs and impressions. And so I can't do it, because the town, as we experience it, as it is presented to us, does not allow us to feel as if it's our territory; there are so many rules and signs to be followed, it has become alienated.
Rediscovering land is rather like autarky. You find your own bit of land, it's yours, and everyone can have his or her own bit. It's all part of the concept of freedom. And there are two things which are very dear to me: freedom and art, in other words going beyond one's time, or refinement through the creative act.

B.G. :

One more question, on which I would like to end this interview: Who do you paint for?

B.R. :

For myself, and for painting. I love painting.

Translated by Pamela Hargreaves.