This painting
Eric Troncy
(excerpt, p. 34-35)
Art invariably offers us choices, be it the best or the
worst. Essentially, and in the end of the day, what is involved
is just propositions, some of them more ambitious than
others, to be considered or ignored, to be adjudged, perhaps,
loved, or loathed. Where truth is concerned, they only
address judgement, and, whatever their motivations (the day
and age has taught us that they might be of any kind–psychoanalytical,
experimental, sociological, mercantile, pathological…),
their sole function is to stir up an opinion among
those keen to play the game. This opinion is constructed
from a very diverse set of things and, to all appearances,
this set of things varies from one person to the next. In the
communication of this opinion, the person expressing him/
herself may, within this set, be seeking one thing rather than
another; people set up their own hierarchy. It is the custom,
these days, to give priority to the tangible things in this set:
kinship bonds, a message, a precise raison d'être, a whole pile
of metaphors with the real world, no matter how removed
they might be from any art project. In many instances, the
updating of these things–these things in particular–literally
exhausts and depletes the work, otherwise put, it wearies it,
tires it out, and thoroughly wears it out, and, in a final yawn,
those things fall asleep, and with them so does the spectator.
So saying, it seems to me that the paintings of Ida Tursic and
Wilfried Mille are generously offered to the possibility of that
path leading from tangible things to repose, but they also, and
above all, set against it a purpose of non-reception.
To be sure, they seem altogether ready for and available
to ordinary reflections about copies, appropriation, sex and
its representation, images in the Photoshop age, eroticism
in the Internet age, the esoteric wealth of cinematographic
representation, and who knows what else, but one feels before
very long at all that this is quite frankly not their goal. No avenue
is really followed up, nothing is delivered, things are there,
that is for sure, but like so many inevitable components, like so
many benign accidents, dross of the day and age, traces of life.
So let us, what is more, immediately deal with the thing about
eroticism, or pornography, often pointed to with regard to the
paintings of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille: yes, this dimension does exist, but (with time) it has tended to dwindle, and these
days it is quite possible that their oeuvre includes as many
abstract as figurative canvases, which perforce imposes a
moderation on sexual representations. But they are in fact
there, and we notice them all the more because elsewhere we
do not see them, or, more exactly, we do not see them very
much–elsewhere meaning in the painting of other painters of
their generation: Tursic and Mille were both born in 1974. It
seems to me, furthermore, that painting, it just so happens, is
not the preferred medium of the other painters of this generation,
which is, a fortiori, a figurative one, and it is true that,
in particular, the alternative that this oeuvre pits unaggressively
against the torrents of abstract paint flowing elsewhere
works in its favour. And among the answerless questions that
this painting seems to address, there is precisely the issue of
the representation of images in the form of their measured
disappearance, among this generation which is, for all that,
described as being suffused by digital images, whereas it–that
representation–seemed truly present in the previous generation
(Peter Doig, John Currin, Jeff Koons). These particular
figures do, incidentally, swiftly turn up in the construction of
an opinion about the painting of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille:
these paintings do not actually make any mystery about their
ideal kinship bonds–with the painting of
Gerhard Richter,
Ed Ruscha, James Rosenquist, Jeff Koons, and
Richard Prince–
but they have chosen for themselves a family that has been
put back together to such an extent (with Niele Toroni in the
role of the beloved old uncle and
Gustave Courbet playing the
part of the great-grandfather one would have so much liked
to know) that the only meaning it has is to indicate its intent
to enter into a dialogue with this family, which, what is more,
regularly finds for itself new cousins several times removed, so
much so that one quite well understands that, in truth, what
is involved is the family of great painters in its entirety–their
period and their stylistic allegiance being of little import.
(...)
