Abstract

This thesis defends the musical quality of pictorial art as the absolute value of an artistic quest. Music is the paradigm of a wandering that impregnates space and time. The flowing of painting corresponds to this aspiration : it designates the fluid properties of the material while evoking a temporal dimension peculiar to the musical model and to the experience of life.

Entendre the painting means experiencing its unfolding as space and time. The whole body becomes a receptacle for the rhythm of forms beyond the simple visual appreciation of an artwork. The pictorial form is felt as an entity in perpetual autogenesis, just as music and sound surround and invade us. Such conviction is anchored in the philosophical thought of Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus : sensing (to sense) admits the receptivity to artistic forms in their emergence and in their becoming.

The painterly quality of an artwork promoted by Baroque art as a quest for open and irregular shapes inspired the formal dimension of this research. Shape springs as rhythm rather than structure.

Painting resonates in a moment of shared space: the notions of surface and scale specify the temporal understanding of the pictorial, as well as the collaboration with musician and composer Joe Fee during a multidisciplinary event at LeFrak Hall, Queen College, December 2012 and the encounters with the paintings of Barnett Newman (MoMA, New York) and Mark Rothko (Rothko Chapel, Houston).

The idea of intonation, borrowed from the musical context, assumes a plastic value. It relies on the moment in which the form find its way through the material. The intonation of painting also depends on its spatialization. Theatrical experience (Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook) provides a particularly fertile model for evoking the generative quality of a form and the sense of accuracy that derives from it presence in a given time and space.

The intensive practice of intaglio oriented the artistic approach towards a quest for pictorial intonation by using the technical means of printmaking, especially during the inking of the plates.

Between impermanence and renewal, a form takes shape by the intonation of its context, in the provisional moment of its birth. In the personal practice of art, painting is the material place of a quest while music persists as its first aspiration.

Full test available at :http://www.theses.fr/2017PA01H304