ALAIN SAVEROT 'S
PICTURIAL WORKS

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Conception and
Esthetic interpretation

By Hassen BAHANI

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Alain SAVEROT
Contact Email : contact@artactif.com
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I - THE CREATIVE WORK :

      No one can challenge the obvious fact that cultures are not frozen. They are subject to the law of movement and change, and are identifiable by their usual values. Trying to stubbornly hang on to the past indefinitely as if it were an unchanging truth, is a path to absence and death. Consequently, to build the future, one must necessarily take down the former system of thought -- a hard task requiring great patience. A painful task for an artist who prefers a sovereign burn to projection and brushing up against lampposts or lightbulbs. He must prepare propitious conditions that will further the emergence of a new imagination. The more radical the painter's vision, the more it is perceived, by our conformism and our institutional gaze, as disordered and in disharmony. The message has very little chance to "get across". So that any desire to create presupposes a capacity to stand up to adversity and misunderstanding, a desire for sacrifice and a basically Promethean spirit. Like the universe, the horizon of our immaterial existence extends and broadens every day. Indefinitely. Not in a mechanical, real way, but in the fictional configuration that is molded in the hands of the artist. And when he accepts to go to the heart of marginalization and possibly suffering, he forges a new world and a new being. He becomes an alchemist of our imagination, not only by communicating what he knows, but also and above all by inventing ... inventing signs, symbols, images and sounds that are not yet known.

1°/ Building the world, perpetually:
     Alain Saverot believes in freedom to create, meaning the possibility to open up to the world, a world of production of the human spirit not by imitation but by invention; this means by adding another sense, another symbol, another look. An original look, radical and new. But creativity for him does not suppose any design or mythical vision. It corresponds, rather in its ultimate and complete phase, to an impulse that gives birth to the work, uproots it, and stands it up to fill an existential gap corresponding to a need and a gut feeling. It is the expression of an internalization. The internalization of a radical necessity whose absence could only be filled by anxiety and terror.

2°/ The patient quest :
      Saverot's painting does not set down what is already known.
It goes to the heart of phenomena and tries to explore them. It is a search patiently undertaken in time and space, a quest by meditation, an expression of depth and contradiction: the depth of the being in its relation with the absolute. Because for Saverot "there is no certainty, there is only the search. There is no response, there are only questions. The problem is not to answer questions, but to ask them. Art and science are great questions -- religion is too often a set of readymade answers" (1).

3°/ Painting as a means of transforming the world :
     In a crucial letter sent on 18 August 1991 to his friend Mrs. Irmgard Münster-Hubmann, Saverot defined his conception of painting: "I like to bring the unreconcilable together ... my painting itself, although unitary, is the result of contradictions, variable influences coming together. Painting for me is a means of gaining knowledge. And a way of transforming the world: it is a tool, to my eyes, and almost transcendental. A sensitive, but intellectual shortcut where the dreams, which take up much of our time in life, also play a role. A means to apprehend other, unknown dimensions ... religious painting is above all the Socialist Realism of Religion: that doesn't concern me. If I had a religious spirit, it still would not concern me. I am post-plastic".

4°/ As a means of apprehending the Absolute :
     Saverot claims that he is "haunted by the absurd". But there is a word that often comes up in his writing -- absolute, absolute, absolute. Absolute as an opposition to relief, he says. There cannot be several absolutes: they must all come together. The absolute is unconditional, uncomposed, indeterminate, shapeless. No discourse can expose it, no precise thought concerns it (...) the absolute is an invitation to a silence and a voiceless reception of that which cannot be expressed. Any hope of approaching it or encountering it is only absurd vanity. But still, mankind, mystics and even artists or poets cannot give up that hope. The hope without illusion, for which the only delivery is death". "But man is his own absolute by his independence. By his liberty. The absolute is the structure of structure, man is the structure of man. The absolute is ONE, but it's interpretation is multivarious, infinitely, and results in any number of possible expressions, according to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz" (1).

5°/ As a means of expressing vertigo :
    Because "all paths lead to emptiness, to the incomprehensible. The cosmos or the atom: matter, space and time. Even our logic is helpless.", Alain Saverot continues in his letter of 18 August 1991 to his friend Daniel Fauconnier: "Jean Guitton wrote: the number of individuals existing inside a particle of matter is so much greater than anything our imagination can conceive, that its effect is comparable to terror ...'. But, there is an enormous emptiness between the elementary particles ... This is the vertigo that I'm trying to represent in my creation as the critic André Parinaud understood so well. But this vertigo is perceived in a humane form. Meaning in its interactions with sensitivity and intuition. I am post-plastic -- a cosmic figurative artist pervaded by the Orient."

6°/ The act of painting :
     How can a painter go from the state of knowledge to the state of painting, from the state of conception to the state of achievement, and the state of the concept to the state of birth and explosion, from the state of anticipation to the state of completion? First, Saverot is permeated by, filled with the light of the world. Facing him, also in the internal subconscious part of his being, are the palette, water, objects, unreal subjects, colors .. He is overcome by deep meditation. He internalizes entirely to another universe. And his glance changes into perception, since he is in communication with his heart. His entire being identifies with the dimension around him. He is everything that encircles him and conversely. He projects himself integrally into the work he is constructing: the pace, shape, the colors invade the painter's outer and subconscious being. The transmutation is instantaneous.
     The heart, in a vital breath, commands the hand, which moves, traces, throws, transcribed, rises, incrusts, dilutes, dissolves into a total and absolute vertigo ... then comes a moment that cannot be described ... and the work comes forward, is disclosed. It discloses a mystery, a sensation, beauty, a world. When successful, the work becomes a revelation of birth which is grafted on the skin of the expanding universe. Then, if the meditative moment preceding the creative act can be long and patient, sometimes taking years due to take root and to bloom, the material accomplishment of the work is relatively short for Saverot. The ultimate act corresponds to an impulse, like an instantaneous spark: "For me", he writes, "a drawing, a painting is an attentive meditation, which must be done as quickly, roughly speaking, as a 24 x 36 photograph. On that basis, like a photographer, I choose, I eliminate. A vision of a painting is instantaneous. To my eyes it should be achieved instantaneously as well (...). The comparison between painting and photography stops there: my work is abstract above all and my figuration has nothing to do with photography".
     Described in this way, the act of creation is decidedly an experience of transposition and a projection of symbols and signs taken from the heritage of a culture and a civilization. Individualized and extremely internalized, it is drawn out painfully, because it translates a certain momentary and illusory proof that replaces a long, stubborn doubt. The act becomes an essence, not only of what the painter is, but of what he wants to be -- a gleam in the light of the Absolute light, to be sublimated and enriched, prodigiously enriched. The being reaches a new, transformed condition. But it is still vulnerable and easy to burn. As fragile as a calibrater that has subjugated light. (2). It isn't this how our imagination deploys and extends in time? It becomes a changing, moving maker of symbols. It becomes an agent of modernism.

II - THIS GAZE, THIS FLAME OF THOUGHT :

     These eyes that watch, this expression in the eyes, or the glance that we simply see everywhere in Saverot's works. The gaze is omnipresent. It is always there, occupying a crucial place on the canvas. It is always there, meditating, reflecting, staring intensely at light, seizing the tension of fire, revealing the alternation between truth and doubt, tracing the ages, suspending a motion, drying tears, condensing the essence, changing dogmas, reflecting the environment, interpreting the beat, recovering breath, moving in a world of emptiness, spreading in thickness of fullness, wondering and wonderful, imposing the violence of pace, whispering the strength of a color, disturbing the rut of our platitudes, moving off like a horizon, moving in like a shore, hammering out exile, creating beauty, inspiring eternity, bubbling with latency, unifying the being by revealing the nudity of its heart, rising to the fullness of dreams and aspirations, grasping prayers and the wave of silence in this vertigo of spirals on the edge of the  l'horizon,   l’horizon,   l’horizon..."
saverot, painter, composer

"The artist's role", said Paul Eluard, "is to guide, to open the stubbornest eyes, to teach how to see the way we teach how to read, and to show the way from the letter to the spirit".

Expressing art according to the rules of the Absolute:
      Generally, the spectator tends to try to appreciate the lines, relief, colors, and obvious meaning that needs no interpreter, a classic reference. Naive or dead, it doesn't matter. And what he sees reassures him always, since it reinforces his convictions and his habits and in no way disturbs his preconceived, well and long established ideas. He likes to admire consistency in relief, balance in the composition ... this kind of painting does no more than imitate, reproduce what already exists. Painting is something else. It is "the symbol of a value that must be found in the painter's imagination" (Lionello Venturi). Painting is the expression of the projection of the being on eternity in time and space, of light on movement, of infinite passion of a being struck down by the desire to invent. Invention in the senses after invention in writing. Invention in ideas as well because "an art without ideas, is a man without a soul, reduced to a corpse", affirms Belinski. If the new vision developed by the artist seems difficult initially (because it is idiosyncratic, even though the approach and purpose tend toward the universal), it finally integrates our awareness and our perception. So, contrary to ideas developed by certain critics, there is nothing subversive about modern, innovating part; it simply makes the sovereign relationship between the artist and the public effective and total. Any work of art vehicles an idea and a sensation.  

     The idea may be secret or incomprehensible, but the sensation is immediately accessible to any sensitive person. If not how can we explain the spectacular success of Alain Saverot's pictorial exhibit in Tunis at the Khawarizmi Center in 1998? The appreciation of the public, particularly young people, who seemed to find a totally true mirror of their inner selves reflected on the canvases, surpassed all expectations. The works revealed an illumination. A thunderbolt. A stroke of lightning. A blinding light to an eye seeing for the first time. A woman, of childbearing age, literally broke into tears: "I have the impression that I'm watching the birth of the world!", she says. The painter took care to express his emotions by drawing an imaginary configuration of his impressions. A poetess of Arabic expression declaimed: " what power have I? What can I do -- I who am suddenly fragile facing this emptiness!"». artiste-public.    

III - A  NEO-SPIRITUAL CONCEPTION OF ART

1°/ New visions, a new spirit
     At the beginning of the '70s and after a few attempts at expressionism, Saverot achieved surprising paintings with a vibrant strength which, in the opinion of certain critics, had the same intensity and power as works of the "Masters". His works appeared, alongside his very personal and original form, to be inspired by Van Gogh, and a bit by Picasso. From the former he took the colors in their arrangement, outlay, structure, combination and brilliance. From the latter he took the lines, the curves, the speed, the flight. From the former, passion; from the latter, idealism.
     But as from 1984, he freed himself totally. He was no longer interested in the conjunction of forms and colors -- he sought another science. The canvas was no longer a place for light or decorations; it was no longer an area of formal, rigid geometry. It no longer existed as an exclusive object. The canvas became the foundation of another visual language, another way of seeing, another perception.
     Saverot erases and reconstructs a different way. He withdraws, during long periods of doubt and profound pain (1980-1984), in solitude and an existential vacuum. The painter invests and invades silence. Creative silence. He understands that painting is not in its appearance and that it includes up an experiment, that is a form of questioning, a reflection and a confrontation of ideas and objects. The painting becomes the invention of signs -- something missing in existence. Something that can only be found in the mysteries that form the foundation of a new perceptive base, capable of reversing the relationship between artists and nature.
     From this point on, "nature imitates art" using André Malraux' expression. Saverot discovers a surprising talent for composition that refuses imitation. The pictorial horizon that he manages to define has a particular and fortunate characteristic, (unlike Mondrian, Pierre Soulages or even Polloc-whose approach, without any value judgment, takes him to the edge of rigor and subjection beyond which it is technically and ethically impossible to go) of serving as the beginning for future experiments, as landmarks for another exploration. The pictorial scope is open to all possibilities. Mobile, flexible, showing the possibility of another order, giving away to another look. These gazes set up in a spiral of moving colors are perfectly integrated into spirit of a mystic concept of art. The gazes oscillate; their intensity varies in a graphic arrangement that is almost shapeless but always recommenced differently. The glances project outward or inward, creating their own world, their own purified, neutral space, often a background of uniform white. They are born of the convergence of several lines; they spring out of the composition with the balance of which they are the center. They found and mingle in another esthetic: "beauty is awareness" Saverot tells us. "The esthetic obeys complex laws that go far beyond the single order of the reasoning reason, although this esthetic "which also joins knowledge" cannot do without the structural arguments to contain it in new shapes and in the reinterpretation of classical form; these are the arguments of revolt and the construction where the subconscious unfurls".
     Our communication with beauty is based on symbols, signs chosen by the artist in a conscious or unconscious way. The signs correspond to a need, translate a spirit, project a future. They create sense, disclosing sensitivity, telling the story of the work, the artist, mankind.
     Their final purpose is to reach the abyss. Every canvas is the space of a rhythm, a chromatic tone (light, yellow, red, blue, black, ..) of balance between fullness and emptiness, a dialectic that leads to an explosion, a silence that speaks out. There is an esthetic order that is transformed into a structured parable by factors of absence-presence. The closer we come to the canvas, the more the grain and the thickness, the recipients of an ardent, spiritual hand, radiate and absorb us. The space is made mystic, it is diluted so that presence becomes an absence and vice versa. Between eye and canvas a perceptive, transcending and transmuting relationship is established. The canvas is charged with a potential for undefined spirituality, a secret space where mysteries sing, a sacred site of quest and meditation. We may be tempted to say with Sartre " Reality is never beautiful" and that, "beauty is a being that cannot be perceived". "The work of art takes flight", says Saverot, "like the urinals in the imagination of Marcel Duchamp that took flight and took over in the collective imagination with fascination or exasperation; a work of art takes flight, when it forces us to redefine truth, reality. Against an established order, towards that which is strange and abnormal, non-aseptic."
     True, the work of art takes flight when we understand that it can never be reduced to what it apparently represents; when we have learned to look at it, to embrace all of the relationships that it maintains both with the real and apparent, and with the intentional and perceptive; when we have forged a perception informed on the technical esthetics of the work as well as its genetic elements. If not how can we explain that Van Gogh's chair does not invoke the same feeling as a photograph? There is in fact an element that cannot be avoided that creates the relationship between the technical dimension of a painting and its esthetic sense. This painting by Van Gogh (an ordinary, simple share made of straw and wood on which a pipe and a tobacco pouch seem to languish, has value particularly due to the esthetic dimension and its poetic power. It explores the unreal, it "takes flight" using Saverot's image.

2°/ A revolutionary esthetic
     The esthetic inaugurated and then developed in Saverot's works accumulates revealing signs of an art with a very futuristic approach and conception. Certain critics have likened him to Rouault, given his perfect mastery of colors and the expression of mystical and satiric connotations. Others thought they could see his interaction in the works of Miro, since Saverot has a more dynamic, impulsive gesture with regard to the canvas, and constantly gives priority to free action and a founding vision of the world in constant construction.
     But Saverot is neither one nor the other. His ambition is to construct a painting that is accessible to all cultures and all civilizations, and uses that technical means specific to painting, alongside the inventive resources inspired from music and poetry. The craze to explore and invent is part of his essence to the extreme, he lays the foundation of a perception formed, not as a relative view (whether in time or in space) but a universal perception.
     His painting becomes metaphysical. The composition, the tones, the types, the line, the grain trace another configuration, "bringing a synthesis of new esthetics, continuing on the great path laid by our famous ancestors - from primitive art to lyrical abstraction -- towards a spirituality of art particularly appreciated by the Zen calligraphers".
     This is in fact, a new spiritualism developed since 1984 and enriched as from 1994, after more than 20 years of attempts and pictorial research endured at times in pain and silence.

Translating a hint of God's soul

     On the canvas, the thickness is one of an abstract alienation. An alienation that constructs overcoming, as opposed to the total freedom of the pictorial gesture. The dynamic of opposition between compiling and spreading, between interior and exterior, between conscious and unconscious. The development of a Saverot painting does not spring from totally unconscious creativity. In some paintings, the final touch required more than ten years of waiting and interfacing. The pictorial act does not always always obey an immediate gesture-it imposes a coming together of several tensions, the fermentation of several perceptions and several desires for
                       Each gesture that drills into the canvas,
                       Wears out the skin, lights the flame of art.
                       An ingenious gesture on the texture
                       That probes the sea and the stars.
     The colors and lines almost constantly show an esthetic unity, but for each painting they create a different iconic palimpsest. They attract to reveal a "hint of God's soul". Like Pollock and Dubuffet, Saverot refuses to use art as a feast for the eye "my painting is not meant for the retina, it is addressed to the heart".
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The painter gives a metaphysical meaning to the notion of shape, an original meaning. What we believe we see is not what we see. The artist must try to seek truth in shapes, to encompass the ellipse but not in a premeditated or analogous way, not deliberately or in consultation, but patiently as he works his way through a long experiment. An experiment based on a breach and a question to achieve a concept of painting which establishes the correspondence between pictorial action, poetical action and musical action.

"After all, isn't his effort intended first to destabilize our preconceived ideas and to go beyond ordinary vision, to plunge us in this source of uncertainty and complexity?" Asks André Parinaud, then going on to say: "Saverot not only puts us in the presence of the last stages of lyrical abstraction, his testimony is an expression of an existential search". (1)

 

 
SAVEROT, THE MAN

 

      Born in Sousse, Tunusia :
      Alain Saverot was born in Sousse, Tunisia on 25 March 1947, his father an officer and his mother a violinist (and subsequently piano teacher). Both his parents came from Burgundy, an area known the world round for its exquisite fine wines. He has two younger brothers, one a computer specialist and father of four children, and the other director of a residence for the disabled, father of one child.
      At 26, he married Marie-Claude, who gave him one son, Charles.

      A man of contradictions: wise and tourmented, but a great lover of life!
      How can I describe the man? He has the eyes of all those who have been given the gift of plenitude. But with the serene force that comes with a sort of visionary, tormented wisdom. On one hand he is impenetrable and secret, shy, often inclined to be silent in communion. It all places and at all times, we feel that he understands the current and the timeless, incarnate or deployed, impulsive and determined, suspended and in-flight.
      Saverot cultivates contradictions and the desire to reach the horizon of the ages and the movement of ideas. His forehead shows the eruption of essence constantly seeking fulfillment, and his eyes are bright with a corrosive intelligence. But he smiles easily, spontaneously, and in his hours of loneliness he likes to sing. Saverot loves singing, flying, leaving. At a very early age he undertook to follow the migratory flows to Africa where he learned to forge new ties in the depth of his being

 

     In an orange colored world :
     This man has convictions, but no dogma, he very quickly knows how to question himself, to say no without hesitation. At 25 he joined the Communist Party and resigned almost immediately: "my parents were politically much too far right" he explained later, in a letter addressed to his friend Clementine on 2 April 1990. "They pushed me towards the French Communist Party in reaction, but today, it doesn't give me the essentials of what I'm looking for."

saverot, painter, composer

Further on he continues: "it's because I believe in the possibility of an orange- colored world dominated by love, rather than interest". In an open-minded world of multiple trends. He does not accept to take root in a single country, nor to correspond to a dogma and still less a religion.     
     For Saverot, the world is multiplicity and opening: "my religion, which has no dogmatic structure, goes toward all religions, from Islam to Christianity, to Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and why not Animism or even at Fetishism". Because for him "the most beautiful form of prayer and the most sensible consists of doing something constructive and coherent with one's life.

     His wife, Marie-Claude.
     His wife, Marie-Claude, a girl draped in grace and childish smiles in 1971 took the path to him, filling with her presence and enormous sensitivity his feeling of emptiness and being lost that made him distant and stubbornly misunderstood.

Hassen Bahani
(Tunis, 2003)

 


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