by Jano Xhenseval, painter

La Croix, Friday, January 11, 2008 (in a double-page dedicated to the «fascinating white»)

Full or empty...? Reserve or color? Light? Seen by painters, white is not an addition, even less a hole, but a availability, an energy, a way to highlight other colors.

Cézanne, for example, offers us white spaces where the canvas is barely touched, just caressed, in waiting. Not waiting for color, but waiting for resonance, by the proximity of colored strokes that surround these areas.

It is common to hear, in art schools, the professor suggest adding white to colors to lighten them, to make them brighter, but it is a deception. White weakens the tone, makes it dull, milky, and in any case, it doesn't transport us into the magic of «color light». Rembrandt, with his blacks, sepias, and shadows, tells us more about light than these creamy whites of titanium or zinc!

Some modern products offer us a vision with two readings depending on the position of the work relative to the external light source. It is difficult to master both readings, as they cannot be perceived simultaneously. However, the infinitesimal time traveled between two tilts informs us, like an infinite variety of harmonics that would fill the space, and if the gaze falters a little before this profusion, the emotional experience is rich, intact, and invites us to tune our gaze. The gold of icons already said something about this small «studio laboratory», with their gleams, their retreats, their radiant, moving diffusions.

Didi-Huberman tells us, regarding the fresco of the Madonna of the Shadows by Fra Angelico: "The painter literally projected, from a distance, a rain of multicolored spots that create on the surface, not what marble workers call a ‘granite,’ a network, but rather a semi-completely irregular one, a speckling where, here and there, accidents and eruptions of pure white stand out." (1)

The quest for this earlier white... continues to obsess the artist like a lost world, a better lost, and perhaps the path to these reunions remains hidden. Fortunately! "What my eyes cannot see in what they see, I must paint to see it," wrote Jean-Louis Chrétien.

The painting teacher from my childhood used to say: "Today, we are going to learn to make shadows." I never heard him say: "We are going to learn to paint light." You don't learn light, you don't paint light, it is given, already reserved for the first day of the world, introduced before the work... liquid... initial, cradle of the soul, there is nothing to say about it, nothing to make noise about: it speaks!