Galleries in Paris

Patrick Saytour’s paintings try to get out the representation some thing that obliterates it, that crosses it out, makes it up and highlights  it. This enterprise is based not so much on a negation ( exorcism) of the icon (of both painting and artist) as on an atempt to contrast it with what would be its counter-form , its offcut; that  which is linked to it into the continuity of excess (art as reality’s counter-form). In Saytour’s work ,exces ,going over the edge, in the theatrical sense,is in the vein of carnivals and rites of reversal, embodied by the figures of the“kiljoy” and the“ stand-in”.

In using pre-formed pictorial spaces (table cloths , curtains, nets, rugs, walpaper, blankets) the artist acepts that things are already givenf rom the outside, and that the work consists in having an impact on, and inserting himself into, that which precedes it: nullification of  a theory of taste and a theory of inspiration.

Also,the grid, arecuring patern in Saytour’swork, materialises the pre- existing outline,  the structure in which the artist is always already “caught” (in the sense of being caught in the mesh of a net, in reality).

For Saytour, what contrasts with representation is presentation, actionor “intervention”– in short,the way things are“touched ”(by that“immemorial vacant gesture”asMalarmé would say,or what Duchamp would call the grace of“canned chance”, Tyche being the goddes of fortune)

.The crease and the burn are two of Seytour’s main “tyché” interventions, systematicaly applied to preexisting reference points on the medium–this time on intersection points between lines,as well as on paterns that a stroke re-marks in a game of obliteration and intensification.

These actions reflect the neutrality of the gesture, the “pure” action that intervenes on the canvas by searching for an external reason for its own intentionality.

Another undercurent of the work, the reprising or “restarting” heinitiated in the 1990s ,consists in taking old pieces as reference points for new series of works , in a game of self-echoing, of fragmenting the frame of it’s own history, renewing one’s own ofcuts and counter-forms in order to create new  extremities.

“One never setles into a transgresion, ”saidDerida. “Transgresion implies that a limit is still in effect”.

Copying  oneself, transgressing  oneself, endlessly,not  “going beyond”  oneself  but going over one’s edges: unlimiting oneself in the crosings-out.
TextbyClaraGuislain