The kettle, 2022

Claude Billès  

Learn, master (pictorial) techniques, be reassured in contact with them, and finally part with them, first unconsciously and then fully assumed, in favor of an aesthetic of error; this is what his path as a plastic artist has been. For several years now, his research has focused on the formal exploitation of failure, of the dumpling, of the blunder, of the clumsiness. The damaged image will always seem richer than a clean image. He looks for the loophole which cannot be caused but which can arise by taking unknown paths, by taking risks. He trusts experimentation and sees himself as an observer of the effects caused by his actions in a search for a balanced composition. In this sense it is less a question of relying on chance, than of nourishing one's art with the circumstances that arise during creation. Also Claude Billès gives more importance to the accidents encountered and consciously integrated than to the achievement of a formal objective.

His art is a constant catching up of his mistakes.

Sometimes at the border of abstraction, his work is always, in one way or another, in direct contact with reality, whether in its representation, or in its tangible grasp to form composite and hybridized productions. : paintings integrating cables, objects, thread, fragments of magazines… The production of digital images also responds to this notion of layers and stacking of data from reality. The artist superimposes layers of photos of objects, landscapes, textures. The image processing software offers an infinite number of combinations, mergers and density of transparency of the strata. There is only the manipulation which makes it possible to envisage exits. He cannot think of the final image, it is constructed before his eyes, only harmony will dictate the end of the search.

The choice of the medium is not made according to what he wishes to express but is linked to the circumstances of creation and precisely to the constraints of the moment: materials, equipment, available time. In this sense there is no pretext for not creating. No matter the tools and the technique, his works are always the result of a moment when the key words are constraint, experimentation, accident and finally balance. Everything is likely to become a creative act, provided you want to focus on things and extract a composition. Its ambition is to develop a multidisciplinary production by essence where everything is potentially raw material and anchored in an aesthetic of valuing error.