christian rolet | installations & paintings
A cosmorganical art
We forget too often that without the artists, and their powerful gift of imagination, we simply would not be able to grasp the world where we live.
It is not a question of personal vision or interpretation of this world, but of this faculty of imagination itself, necessary and indispensable to the representation of what was until recently called the universe.
Thanks to ingenious mathematical scaffolds of fundamental physical theories, and cosmologists that daily refine the probabilities that this universe, not only would not be unique, but that there would be parallel universes obeying laws much more complex than those which are familiar to us. The interpretation of multiple worlds, the "multiverse" of quantum mechanics, is not far off.
Without this power of the artist, we would have to trust the intuitions of our cosmologists and other astrophysicists searching for new theories. Or consult miles of mathematical formulas trying to translate these intuitions.
When it comes to the impalpable world, scientists thus have the artists as allies. They have this sometimes childish capacity of original curiosity, of openness, sensory intuition and palpability of the infinite. They help us see in this obscure immensity more than beauty, more than meaning, materiality and thickness. A thick and reassuring materiality that opens a window to this incomprehensible quasi-abstract structure from which we come and in which we evolve in spite of ourselves.
Christian Rolet is one of those artists.
Layer upon layer, his mind propels the matter that his canvases immediately absorb. Time is his ally, as in the infinitely small from which we come and the infinitely big in which the Big Bang continues to push us.
Giving the canvas time to adjust to its new state, to dry, he works in parallel on another canvas, then a third. This multiplication of the process responds, by contagion, to an imperative organic law.
In two or sometimes three dimensions, Christian Rolet opens the access of these worlds to ours. And vice versa. And this, perhaps, to infinity.
The materials he animates are all brightly coloured, and dominated by red.
This red captivates us, because it brings us back to our organic origins, almost "cosmorganical".
This umbilical red in his paintings undoubtedly links us to our cosmic matrix.
Looking at those paintings, appeasement takes place. So we feel bounded and connected to infinity, like the child to his mother.
We feed it and the way around. More than a window on these worlds, the paintings of Christian Rolet are a reminder of our belonging to interstellar order or disorder from which we come.
Elegance
The gesture of the painter is supported by that sort of elegance towards which he tends. Like the scientist, he is looking for internal consistency. It is the point of balance and tension of the composition that, once achieved through a secret formula, allows the artist to withdraw, satisfied.
The canvas is now ready to do its magic.
This art of elegance, Christian Rolet also looks for it in three dimensions. He recycles common objects that he installs side by side or intertwined. And the magic comes true again.
Opening before us fields of unexpected meaning. For example, "the library of dreams", on the cover of this edition.
This slender hand reviews eye protections. Helping him, shielding his absent eyes from the light, passing through the other side of the consciousness, and picking one or other dream. But what are dreams if not an extra dimension to our apprehension of the world?
Further, a skull. A remnant of a human being reborn as a "bibi", vestige of another century. A reminder of previous lives. That of the man or the child to which belonged the skull, that of the feathered animal that was used to create the finery. Cycles and recycles.
The art of reinvented meaning, the essence of reincarnated matter.
It is tempting to conclude that Christian Rolet, both in his paintings and installations, illustrates in his own way the theory of "multiverse" in which life leaves a powerful and indelible trace.
malika es-saidi
arstories|gallery
Brussels, april 2018
