XV, 2021
Patrick Guéguen

“The Simple Hallucination” by Roland Halbert:

The painting of Patrick Guéguen: “outsider art”? “ethnic art”? “singular art”? When we pronounced these magic formulas of criticism, we did not say much. There is much to fear that these are convenient denominations and misleading classifications which prevent us from seeing in depth. Rimbaud sheds more light on these paintings when he evokes simple hallucination: “I got used to simple hallucination. » (Alchemy of the verb). And there's no need for narcotics to elicit this piercing gaze, this on-lookout vision that pierces appearances and crosses fashions. Getting used to simple hallucination is like swapping your opaque screens for the Hubble microscope-telescope. So begins the workshop of the gods and reinvents the creation of the world with the lyrical widening of the eye plunged into the astral aquarium or caught up in the swarming of earthly life.

This simple hallucination – throw away your G.P.S. nettles! – you get away from it all. "The country where one never arrives" is here; "the kingdom of Chimeria", it's probably in the area... "Point, line, plane"? With Patrick Guéguen, rather points in Brownian movement, lines vibrating like a network of neurons, gravitational planes which are created by technical means reduced to a minimum: black ink and Sergent-Major pen; acrylic with a vivid range and three brushes 0, 2, 4; 300 g Montval paper. And yet, here you are alerted by the rhythmic abundance, the floating filaments, the triple helices of DNA, the arborescent compasses, the planets of pollen, the tropical and gyratory flora, the fauna confronted in telluric currents... Alerted also by the extreme formal coherence: the focus of the smallest detail electrifies the entire finely crafted composition. Recognize it: in your childhood with a white background – with a white appearance! – you have glimpsed this carnival of “heads”, these creaking or facetious skulls, this enchanted bestiary of magnetic storms. At the height of the fever or the dream, you saw those toothy eyes, those showy mouths, those tattooed, tiger, spotted limbs. And, on sleepless nights or on days of miraculous awakening, you came close to these primordial figures dancing a gleaming jazz on the edge of the void... Your ancestor from Altamira or Lascaux coalesced the same beasts that were difficult to tame. Your aboriginal cousin still draws similar sandblasted songlines of votive colors. In 5 cm² of a work by Patrick Guéguen (with the sometimes humorous title: Le Biscotto laïque en berne, for example), one could track among the dreamlike profusion both the native spiral of the shaman and the algae-volatiles of Henri Matisse. Time, space in perennial expansion rediscover the memory of each of their ages. The fable, the myth are reignited through meticulous and luxuriant invention. Here, a living imaginary museum, which jostles the collections and departments of the Louvre, circulates cheerfully in the open air from Prehistory until the aftermath of the centuries...

I have known Patrick for ten thousand years and his placid savagery of an upset southpaw always surprises me. It is to him that I ask such information on an old book (area where he worked); it is he who gives me such pointed reference on an unknown painter (Philippe Dereux); it is he who informs me about this pictorial approach off the beaten track (I owe him the discovery of Federico Zeri, the historian of forms). I don't ask anything of him, while sipping a Peroni “Ruban Bleu” beer in his company. In short, we are friends, which means: we only talk about art and never about politics (why fall into this rhetoric of impotence?). We have discussed Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza a hundred times, shot by shot, because great beauty is a bit like our visual and sound Bible, filled with Eves and Noahs. Together, we had an artistic project and here it is, thanks to Gérald Honigsblum of FRAction editions and thanks to Elisabeth Givre of the Gaïa gallery.

My portrait by Patrick Guéguen? Some days, I am this Aztec revived by ritual paintings, this anatomical flayed who laughs at masks candied in conformism, this whirlwind of blood under a skin with saurian scales. On my noggin perched this warbler Orpheus and I feel these two moose caryatids pushing between my shoulders like sexy bitches with conical breasts – à la Jean-Paul Gaultier – and springing up like two long columns of flight . Take a closer look at this Japanese ideogram on their biceps which means: “bird. " Well seen ! “Go, go, go, said the bird: the human race / Can't bear too much reality. (T.S. Eliot). It's up to the art to take care of it for him. One fine day, you too, beyond the simulacra, you will become this unappeasable fire in the aviary. Even if it burns the eyelids, sometimes with a halo of dread, sometimes with a subtle solar joy, get used to the burning retina of hallucination. As Léon-Paul Fargue said of the poet, the painter is a surgeon of body and soul (if you don't have a soul, quickly, quickly, quickly, get one – and more rebellious!—at lucifer.com). And this surgeon with square fingers and tuning fork plays with your nerves, your flesh, your bones; it probes, it opens, it grafts the chromatic marrow of forms; it fills your eyes with herbs and spices to gratify you with an off-calendar season (augmented reality?). Over these fabulously polyphonic and detailed paintings (whatever the format, hours and hours of industrious bee work!), dig your eye, sharpen your ear. It could be that, in a homing language of dense and lucid signs, the plastic poetry of Patrick Guéguen blows in your face the tight aroma of a simple haiku: For what season, have we lacquered our eyes? so many light-years?