Les Humanités : New Work by Paul Béliveau

Les Humanités : New Work by Paul Béliveau

Seamus Kealy, 2003

Paul Béliveau is a romantic painter in the digital age. In his new series of work, Les Humanités, Béliveau uses digital representations as the visual basis for beginning his paintings. Organizing stacks of vintage and contemporary books from his personal collection into a sort of assembled still life, he formats these photographs in a computer as the starting point for his painting process. By visually constructing an image that seems nostalgic for a lost antiquity or literature, he appears to mount a defense against their loss through time and technology. Therefore, in a sense, his work can be viewed as an attempt to reclaim a recollection of the past. Béliveau himself speaks about his desire to seize that which is fleeting and to transform it into a return to itself. He sees this quest as something particular to painting, but also particular to consciousness, both his own and that of civilization’s. this is most important when considering that status of memory  » both in its individual and collective loss through the shifting of the ages. In a way, Béliveau’s work can be seen as an attempt at resisting this process.

Having said that, there is something eerily appropriate about being introduced to Béliveau’s work through a digital format, for this is how I first viewed his paintings. In his work, there is a journey of an original signifier  » such as that of the physicality of a book along with the other varying associations it may yield  » to the final painted image. This has a strange parallel to actually examining digital reproductions of his work. Digital images of Béliveau’s paintings also impart a withholding of the signified or real thing and a flattening of what which should be experienced as an object of representation. Through the process of making his paintings, there is a liquefaction of knowledge and form into representation. In using the digital image of a book, for example, there is a further flattening of what was once an object that contained this information, into pixels and now transformed, almost ironically, back into the substance of paint.

This process « from object of photograph to digital image to real painted object-form  » is strangely circular, perhaps even contradictory. Why put something tangible and real through an indexical and digital space only to return it to materiality, and because it is painted, into an illusionistic space ? Why make paintings this way at all ? This particular journey of the signifier (and the signified) is important to consider, and in some regards, it has an urgent tone towards the status of Painting itself.

Normally this question of process, especially using digitalization, may not have so much importance, but in Béliveau’s case we are viewing something that was not only transferred from one representational form to another for mimetic reasons, but also for consciously symbolic reasons. Béliveau’s consistent choice of books as his beginning point brings to the paintings a certain allegory on the status of memory. The process of making his paintings is about the desire to salvage lost memory and to do battle with the unsalvagability of the signifier  » the real object  » a not uncommon theme in contemporary painting. For Béliveau this romantic gesture is a point of departure in his paintings.

Painting has consistently responded to the advances of aesthetics and representation through technology. It has consistently needed to do so to actually survive. The developments of photography, cinema, television, and now the digital forms of aesthetics have had significant implications on our perception and, on the sattus of Painting. Photography, for example, mimetically and factually reproduces reality. Because of its indexical nature, photography has infected the experience of history and that of individual and collective memory. Therefore with photography’s advent and development, painting has had to shift in order to reposition itself as a contemporary form of representation. Inevitably, cinema also shrank painting’s monumental feeling and even its audience. When we consider the implications of the digital age, the status of painting as a signifier or reality seems tenuous. It may even seem that, at times, Painting itself is now a tangible form of nostalgia; a memory in substance of what art was and has now lost. The aesthetic journey from photography through to digitalization asserts a flattening and a coolness to representation, despite its mimetic ability. Painting can resist this arguably « unreal » space in its own materiality. This is why painters need to work from the now, but with a sense of history and a sense of resistance.

Paul Béliveau uses digitalization despite its flattening of space, form, and knowledge in order to build a sensuous picture. His work, as a form of resistance, is symbolic. It is not an actual salvaging of memory  » this is impossible  » but an acknowledgement in paint of memory’s continual fading. The images of volumes of literature  » ideas and information that shift when processed into new means of consuming this information  » serve to remind us of the transmutation of memory. Painting cannot be a real rendering of what knowledge is, for the idea of knowledge in painting can only be a simulacrum of this fantasy. So Painting, perhaps the most appropriated tool for examining an elusive reality, is a must be, conscious of the continual shifts in technology and information that constantly evolve outside Painting’s own frame of reference and independent of Painting’s progression. This is the wonder of Painting’s position with its limitless possibilities, with its consistently marginal status. This is the position from which Painting ca today most frankly assert itself.

Paul Béliveau sensuously paints what is transferred, what is transformed, what is flattened. In this manner, his work is a romantic gesture and an ongoing restoration project, in that he is revamping that which faces continual loss (both as knowledge and as form) in what Paul Virilio declares to be the hegemonic horizon line of digitalization. At the same moment, Béliveau puts digitalization at the service of Painting. He acknowledges the indisputable utility that the digital and other forms of media offer to painting enabling it to remain fresh. This is how Béliveau can simultaneously be a romantic, an appropriator, and a restorer. The end result, as painted and worked through Béliveau’s hands, is an experience that we can sense most viscerally with our eyes.