SAPIENCE (tondo) Painting

Sylvain Louis-Seize’s Immersive Shine Written by R.M. Vaughan This essay was included in the exhibition catalogue for Sylvain Louis-Seize, Resolute which was held at Oeno Gallery, October 12 to November 10, 2019. Never trust a clean surface. There is always another layer, something underneath. A painting is a bottomless pit (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). A painting is easy to look at, but to really see it – to, in essence, give to the painting what it so evidently wants to give to you, that sweet gift of light and colour and curious, telepathic messages – you have to stare. Stare without reservation. Stare with what people used to call “nerve”, by which they meant strength. Stop whatever you are doing right now and stare at one of Sylvain Louis-Seize’s paintings. The word “paintings” hardly seems enough. You’ll see. I’ll wait right here. * Begin with the basics: shapes, forms, patterns. I see spots. Spots and pools, geographical twists, half-buried crosses, waves and amoebas, zebra stripes, pinstripes, erratic marbling, spotlit corners and shady, secret alcoves. This is not a painting (while very much being a painting), it’s a map. A cartography of crossed roads (and salad-tossed signals) paired, almost deviously, with deliberate, synced semaphores. Your brain searches for patterns, by nature. And when nature fails, we have art. In Louis-Seize’s work, this quest for the recognizable, the known, is both teased and rewarded. (Yes, there is a sexuality in play here. Or, rather, the performance of a sexual dynamic: the old Come Hither look, the naughty glance. How frisky! How very alive!). The eyes land on one reliable visual (a droplet, perhaps a tear) only to be led away from the near-articulated and onto something less formed, less near completion, more primordial (but hardly unschooled nor less “finished” as everything is deliberate). This is the Op-Art game of peek-a-boo played without a ruler or a compass, without all that lifeless math. These paintings are set designs for a dance between two opposing cognitive impulses: the impulse to make order from (apparent) chaos, to be the boss of your own eyes, versus the impulse to submit, indeed embrace, Louis-Seize’s dissociative whirls. Don’t fight it, let both happen at once. Just watch. * Sylvain and I are “of a generation.