Édouard Pignon

For me, the experimentalist does not exist. Or else he is not a complete man. We do not have these people who run experiments on one side and the people who benefit from them on the other. There is no point in the pioneer being merely a pioneer--he must make the entire voyage . . .

In the same way, or in much the same way, an artist is not a man who sees one way, understand in another, and paints in yet another. He is a man who understand the pencil or the paint brush. In attempting to express what he sees, he understands how things happen. He alone can conduct his visual experiment. And he must rely only on himself.

We notice that in our attempt to look, carrying in us all the knowledge, all the cares that are the products of the age we live in, we see things as no one else has seen them. Reality can please the entire world, for everyone puts a new face on it. I have perceived cockfights in that way, because in the second half of the twentieth century, I could see in them what would have escaped from my view, my knowledge, at any other time. The time had come for me to look at them. There are moments of perception which we are given by the times.

Potential for such moments already exists in space, in society. The truth appears to you at a certain instant, because you are prepared to receive it. For example, I went toward those cocks in the midst of an intense atmosphere in painting, of heated discussions, of extremely interesting battles of ideas, in the midst of an ocean of abstraction. In my childhood, I had seen cockfights like everyone else. But at that time, I had come to ask of them something that had to do with the pictorial restlessness of my times and my own restlessness.

Every painting is an answer to a question. Every painting is my part in the dialogue between me and the painting of my time. These are answers that are more or less affirmed, more or less unambiguous, more or less sensitive. But they are the only genuine language. Obviously, it is possible to be deaf to these answers. But they cannot be prevented from existing. It is also possible to be deaf to the answers of Cézanne, of Van Gogh, or of others. The fruit of the painter's cares, borne by the times, will never be understood. None of that is in the air. The artistÍs work is steeped in the pictorial anxiety of his time, but at the same time in other anxieties, which are also political, musical, economic, literary. It is the complete language of his time that he speaks. A language common to all humans.

Édouard Pignon, L quéte de la réalité [Excerpt]