The text below by Barbara Hess entitled «Hommage to the Spray Gun» is an excellent introduction to his works.

„Everything folds in its own way, the rope and the stick, but also the colors that are distributed according to the concavity and convexity of the luminous ray, and the sounds, all the more acute as the trembling parts are shorter and more tense.“
Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque, Paris 1988

In the field of music a suite is an order of pieces with a common programmatic theme. Under the title of the exhibition Suite for Spray Gun Thomas Zitzwitz brings together a series of paintings that were made using a spray gun – a technical tool, which is normally used in industry for the application of lacquers. The other common point of exponates is that the color is painted on a canvas irregularly folded. Only after the canvas is mounted on a canvas.

The process of Spray Paintings can be characterized by a directed chance, since the result of this process, which is of a directed part and another random part, is only visible when the canvas becomes a flat surface mounted on a chassis – similar to the material of a film, which must be chemically developed after exposure.  First of all, with the help of adhesive tapes, we define an area on the coated or raw canvas spread on the floor. Then the artist prepares this one, in a way like a piano by John Cage, by manipulating the fabric and from time to time placing objects under the canvas to design draperies. The surface thus prepared is treated with the spray gun – monochrome or polychrome – on all sides, to such an extent that the parts which are behind a crest and which are not affected by the paint mist remain empty, as the color becomes more pronounced on other parts, and where the absorption capacity of the canvas is exhausted, lakes of colors are formed.

The association of a landscape in relief unites some Spray Paintings with compositions of Abstract Expressionism such as the monumental Mountain and Sea (1952) by Helen Frankenthaler – an effect, which is countered in some works by bands painted on the edges of the image field, which disturbs the spatial effect and which instead emphasizes the very process of painting.

It goes without saying that Thomas Zitzwitz is not the first artist in the history of painting who experiments with folding. Clearly in the discourse of painting after Modernism there is no longer any question of originality or authenticity but of a relationship of difference and productive divergence. The title Suite for Spray Gun is also understood as a reference to the Hungarian exile Simon Hantaï (1922 – 2008) who is a historical representative of folding.

In 1948 Hantaï left as an art student the territory of Socialist Realism and settled in Paris, the world capital of art of that time. There, between 1969 and 1973, was born his group of works Etudes (in music a designation for a musical composition written to serve to exercise the skill of the executant): All over large format executed on canvases folded several times, where the light, unpainted parts evoke an interlacing of bamboo leaves on a monochrome background.

Notably Thomas Zitzwitz’s Spray or Crumple Paintings mark a difference in his own artistic practice. In the second part of the 90s he had realized installations of video, sound and odors. Towards the end of this Decade he concentrated more and more on the paint by using interference pigments, which are applied using a scraper in a transparent acrylic gel. The light- and color-saturated surfaces of these paintings, which are often separated by exact horizontal edges into two or three differently structured parts, change their colors according to the viewer’s

point of view and the light situation. Their hybrid and atmospheric character – which is not only chromatically unstable, but also changes between the type of painting and object – was more evident in 2007 in the artist’s book Moleskine Orangée. There the confrontation with Kodachrome photos dating from the artist’s childhood in the South of France transformed the vivid paintings into abstract images of memory.

A little later, in early 2008, Thomas Zitzwitz started working on the first Spray Paintings: It was also a deliberate change of the shiny and thicker surface“paint with pigments interfering with a more formal and less associative image effect”, as he formulated in his e-mail communication with American artist David Reed.

The relationship to the film mentioned at the beginning is for the Spray Paintings – whose visual appearance develops “only by straightening on the chassis – still significant in other respects. One of their most remarkable qualities is their illusionist and almost phototoréalist depth, since the three-dimensional aspect of the folding is preserved as a trace in the color applied on the canvas stretched. In fact, we can refer to them – like the images of photography or film – with the philosopher Charles S. Pierce as “indexical”.

Because between the spatial arrangement of the canvas on the floor of the studio and the visual appearance of the Spray Paintings as a two-dimensional painting exists a relationship of physical causality – similarly as in the association between the photographed object and its photographic image or cinematographic.Since bending is a transitional form between continuity and rupture – which, as Deleuze writes, is appropriate to divide differences, incompossibilities, disagreements, dissonances […] into as many possible worlds“– The Spray Paintings by Thomas Zitzwitz constantly change between illusionism and self-reference: a moment of instability and ambiguity, which remains essential for his pictorial approach.

CREATURE COMFORTS

“April is the cruelest month…,” announced T.S. Eliot in his post-Spanish flu poem, The Waste Land (1922); Virginia Woolf sent her influenza survivor protagonist, Clarissa, to buy the flowers herself in Mrs. Dallo-way (1925). During the same pandemic, Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch reached the canvas to depict their auto-portraits, tinted by uncertainty, paranoia, and malady.

Perrotin welcomes visitors to Creature Comforts, the gallery’s fifth exhi-bition with American painter Hernan Bas, featuring thirteen new paint-ings the artist has created since March at his Miami studio. A sense of poetic tension prevails the works Bas painted in various scales that range from larger-than-life to intimate, reflecting the broad palette of sentiments experienced by his paintings’ protagonists. A signature in the artist’s unabashedly gilded universe, a suit of young adult men pop-ulate borderline surreal mises en scène with angst remnant from teen-age years and fragility towards the impending manhood. Equally persistent and delicate, blasé twinks gingerly execute flamboyant acts—they flirt with danger, waltz with death, and huddle with pain. Their aloof expressions contradict with the ardor they deliver within each scenario that maneuvers between absurd and perilous. Overall, they challenge our oh-so relished quarantine comforts, ornately tran-scended in Bas’s brushstrokes from mundane to baroque.

Elegance and demise are balanced in Dinner hour at the Little Shop of Horrors, in which a boy’s green gloves grasp a metal chain elevating an animal carcass inside a nursery for carnivorous plants. He satisfies the demurely barbarian plants’ hunger for flesh, not with the enormous slab of meat, but with flies tempted by the smell of the raw cut, depicted here à la Chaim Soutine. In Hot Seat, stakes for risk are high, as well as the length of a serpent draping from the ceiling and nestle around a boy’s neck. A scarlet shade of red washes the room where a terrarium with a host of reptiles occupies the background. A scorching lamp and the boy’s matching-colored shirt complete the inferno Bas illuminates with inspiration from Munch’s Self-Portrait in Hell (1903). Sanguine hues echo in Three Vampires and Nectar (or the hummingbird enthusi-ast), evidently in A+ type blood two boys preserve in medical bags to nourish their pet bat in the former, yet deceptively in the latter. Here, nectar-filled bottles suspend from the branches of a lush tree, perched by a jubilant youngster also feeding his pet avian, a purple-headed hummingbird. A young gentleman seeks shelter behind a sheer veil in How Best to Suffer Swamp Life at Dusk, masking his blue eyes under a ghostly net shrouding over an umbrella against greedy mosquitos. Sheer yet resilient, the veil is already dotted with bugs unable to devour the boy for his blood. Similar to the exhibition’s other subjects, the boy is positioned between discomfort and posture, willfully assuming a pre-carious position in a duello with natural critters.

After nearly two decades since Bas started painting them, the boys—modern day Ganymede’s, Tadzio’s and Elio’s—signal passage into maturity, reflected in their selfless and fatally generous gestures. These young men embrace risks at the expense of their beauty, which has been both their armor and ornament. Once indulgent aesthetes and wistful romantics, they, now, sacrifice their vital fluids or forego their dwellings in attempts to accommodate comforts of creatures they dar-ingly hold dear. In Adult Security Blanket, one fashions his all-black attire with a royal blue blanket, emblazoned with: “Adult security blan-ket. If lost return to D. Bell,” based on a thrift store find in Bas’s collec-tion for over a decade. The box of the original blanket, which is not depicted in the painting, reads: “When all seems to fail, try this ‘true companion’ for comforting consolation…”

Osman Can Yerebakan

New York, September, 2020

Photo : How Best to Suffer Swamp Life at Dusk, 2020. 274,3 × 213, 4 cm | 9 × 7 ft. ©Silvia Ros. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Françoise Pétrovitch once told me she liked her works best during the process of their creation, going against the principle that a soup should be left to cool a little before being consumed. Immediately executed to be immediately relished. Painting carried out in single strokes, without pentimento, alterations or laborious superimpositions, gliding across the support with the ease of a practiced hand. Françoise Pétrovitch’s technique is that of a master craftswoman, a hand that knows its tools and medium. This manual fluidity is reiterated from one work to another, with each oeuvre enjoying her accomplished touch with renewed relish. While observing this fluid pleasure, one forgets that Françoise Pétrovitch was schooled in engraving, the art of scraping and etching, where the tools penetrate the medium rather than gliding across it. As if painting with ink or oil was a release, a relaxation of the tension felt by the engraver’s hand. “I work with the adventures that ink produces, not against them as might be the case with engraving.”

With her background in applied arts, the artist pays particular attention to technical expertise. She exploits the specificities of each medium, while transposing and adapting processes from one to another. Her work on canvas incorporates effects from her oeuvre on paper, such as the use of reserved space that is materialized using white paint. On paper this reserve might act as a drawing or a contour and the border between painted spaces and this unpainted reserve is an impassable frontier. It is in the mastery of these reserves that her practiced hand stands out, creating images made up of blank space within her colors, such as the children, whose skeletons and bone structures appear as reserves of white inside the washes. In the same way, in the figure of the Fumeur, all the iconographic interest lies in the formal effect of the smoke that traverses and fractures the face in a flash of white. Within this fluid painting, the reserve is the part that is solid, fixed and immobile, enclosing or enclosed by the liquid, moving washes of ink. One never really knows if it is the reserve that limits the expanse of the ink or the ink that determines the spaces left untouched.

In the oil paintings recently completed in the studio at Verneuil-sur-Avre in Normandy, the whites constitute the densest areas of her works, as with Lucie (2020) and Aveuglé (2020), where the opacity of the white is reinforced by the hands that mask the faces, annihilating any individuality. There are no portraits in Françoise Pétrovitch’s oeuvre (even in the case of Lucie, which depicts the artist’s daughter). These portraits-that-are-not show faces that are obscured by opaque lead-white hands. Red outlines, typical of the artist’s work over the past fifteen years, intrude on the white surfaces, delineating hands and faces. This can also be seen in the series of insects, inspired by the pseudo-scientific  paintings that have punctuated the history of art. Adopting uncharacteristically small formats, Françoise Pétrovitch leaves the world of humans, birds and mammals behind to invest that of insects and thus introduce the world of plants to which they are organically and mimetically close.

Faithful to ink and paper, Pétrovitch nevertheless defies their limits by enlarging formats to the scale of paintings on canvas or even mural paintings, where the drawing is carried out on an unlimited white surface. A formal amplification accompanies this enlargement of the support. Avoiding any concentrations, these larger formats amplify the fluidity of the ink, in a universe without horizon or depth. Françoise Pétrovitch’s work plays with painting effects but not in a spectacular manner. There is no behind-the-scenes nor backdrop to her work. Everything is visible. The veils formed by paint or ink can be lifted, enhancing the transparency of painting that hides nothing, not even the anxiety dissolved in her manual virtuosity.

Text by Choghakate Kazarian