PHILIPPE TOURRIOL - Paris, France & Marfa, TX
Philippe Tourriol is continually questioning, digging, breaking down the painting. Through his different mediums such as drawing, photography, installation… or oil painting, he asks himself: “how am I a painter?”
Philippe Tourriol is one of those artists who master the art of painting. He studied it, now teaches it and has been painting since the beginning of his carrier. For a time, he did massive canvas in the same way as lyrical abstraction, perfectly aware of the connections made with the American artists, a (sudden) distancing makes him stop in the 00s, what he thinks may be too easy. Rather than using color with vitality, he questions its meaning in art history and in philosophy. Drawing closer to his origins, everything seems to take him back to the Mediterranean Sea, narrated or dreamed. Outside of the color blue that comes from the imaginary, Philippe Tourriol uses endless shades of green, which he likes to grasp in the way of the glacis/glaze of Quattrocento, as much as spray painting, or conveying the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. In this return to fundamentals, reminiscences of childhood flow, in particular the mangoes gathered from the garden, referring then to seeds, fruits and animals in the artist’s mind. He also nurtures the history of flowers, which he wonders about its apparition in art and discovers, with Martin Heidegger, that their representations sharpen in the most conflicting times of the world…
Philippe Tourriol’s work is made of ruptures. From sharpened observations, while being snuggled up in the workshop. From deification of the nature, while living in a vastly urban universe. From a quick and fleeting move to draw, when the high-definition photographs refer to a long time, a suspended moment.While immortalizing very precise objects with his camera, the artist claims that he doesn’t care about the idea of subject. When getting closer to this perfect pixelized, we can understand that it is in the deeps of these oranges, grapefruits and creaminess of the (leaves of thoughts) that the symbiosis with the skin appearance is explored. That the citrons, arbutus or lemons are Talmudic or biblical references. Another key to understand….These pictures almost invoke a scent, transporting the viewer in another universe. The Oranais, from which the artist comes from, emerges at the same time as the French countryside and its interiors filled with trinkets or haloed with an old-world light. A Proustian dimension inhabits his world It may be that for him, the word photography seems too close to the concept of documentary, so he continually specifies that his pictures are pictorial. Evoking the name of Wolfgang Tillmans, for his formats and his blurs in the order of the painting, or this wanted confusion between real and abstract from Cy Twombly. Profoundly open in shapes, his work reconstitutes and feeds itself in a whole, in the way of a cycle in perpetual evolution.
Marie Maertens, 2018
