Ceysson & Bénétière

“It’s a green hollow where a river sings

Madly catching white tatters in the grass.
Where the sun on the proud mountain rings:
It’s a little valley, foaming like light in a glass.”

—Arthur Rimbaud, The Sleeper in the Valley

The invitation card accompanying the new exhibition of Noël Dolla, which revisits the long career of the artist—particularly his work with tarlatans— serves as a perfect introduction. Designed by his son Loupio Dolla, also a visual artist, it subtly, abruptly and poetically addresses the central theme of the exhibition: painting.

Like a riddle in tribute to the artist, born in 1945 in Nice and co-founder of the Supports/Surfaces movement, its visual refers to the medium of painting without ever explicitly naming it. It shows the back of a framed artwork, a rolled-up canvas, production tools, a level to check alignments, a square ruler, a wrench for tightening canvases on frames, a paint-stained apron, a drawing placed on the floor that provides a sense of scale, and, finally, a chair. Like a discarded object symbolizing waiting, absence, or departure. Like a slightly rococo, slightly rustic piece of furniture, in sweet evocation of the South of France. It might even be one of those chairs from the Matisse Museum that perfectly fits Noël Dolla’s self-definition as a "baroque rigorist." Without displaying any painting directly, the whole image alludes to painting as well as Dolla’s many experiments throughout his career. 

From his massive tarlatan works over six-meter-long or large— with many options of display, including being piled up on the floor-, to his folds and creases that adapt to the specificity of each space, through his paint-heavy works with titles referencing the world’s violence, and his softer drawings on Japanese paper, everything speaks of impression, illustration, illusion, or imprint, and raises the question of representation.

Since the late 1960s, Noël Dolla has been part of an ongoing critical movement, which, alongside Supports/Surfaces, as well as groups like BMPT and other individual artists, refused to reproduce reality and sought to present it differently. Yet art history has never been absent from Dolla’s work, always fueled by his passion for experimentation.

Created over nearly 50 years using the same technique, these tarlatan works continually reveal something yet undefined, which “allowed him to handle large surfaces with lightness.” Each canvas is folded, dipped, unfolded, scrutinized, and then folded, dipped and unfolded again to be scrutinized once more. Surprising aethereal, Dolla’s painting refers only to itself and the experience of its own creation. Its tones remain soft, almost diffuse, like distant echoes of primary colors. The works set their own boundaries and become “painting” through such quasi emptiness. Noël Dolla explains: ‘There is no specific narrative since the painting speaks of nothing other than itself, and in the end, what I paint is not what is shown.”

While fully devoted to the medium, the work fulfills itself within a conceptual thought process that escapes direct observation. The exhibition plays on different level: large formats juxtaposed with smaller works, the light against the heavy, the rigid against the malleable.

Displayed in such contrast, the paintings entitled Sniper present an aesthetic that seems to flirt with the concept of flowers while actually depicting shattered, scattered forms—like bodies in times of war. The artist complements these works with a text that interweaves chromatic references to suffocation and the demise of the body. Here, the shining clashes with the horrific, the horizon with vitreous clarity...

Dolla recalls Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, The Sleeper in the Valley, written in October 1870. What initially appears as a peaceful evocation of a river, sun, and mountain ends with the revelation of a young soldier’s death. Meanwhile, drawings of iron and paintings of silent smoke allude to atomic bombs. Presented in square formats, these works unsettle the viewer with swirls that seem to flirt with sensuality.

Dolla’s painting sometimes evokes a sense of unease and danger. He imposes this on himself by always leaving room for chance and confronting large scales in which the viewers can lose himself. He either allows himself long production time or directly assaults his canvases, sometimes working in suspension above them, disfiguring and mistreating his chunks of colors.  

Dolla thus redefines the relationship to the body—the artist’s and the viewer’s in front of the work- urging us to confront themes of presence and absence.

Speaking of time and absence, the exhibition is also a discreet tribute to his recently departed friends and companions, notably Ben, Louis Cane, and André-Pierre Arnal...

Dolla’s work happens in that space between the creation of something highly precise and delicate and the necessity of letting go. The hundred or so pieces unveiled—many of them never exhibited before—presented on the floor or hung on the walls, radically transform angles and perspectives, giving a rhythm to the gallery space, with its nearly six-meter-high ceilings.

In his art, Dolla does not wish to convey a specific message, but the three big masts gilded with gold leaf placed in front of the gallery and elevated by white fabric like an immaculate handkerchief hint at many possibilities of interpretations. Perhaps a call for a truce in these troubled times… a need to take distance, to rise above… or simply an invitation to admire the rectilinearity of the lines and the purity of the fabrics… an invitation to admire the works. 

Ultimately, the goal is “to always bring painting to a state of maximum visibility”.

Marie Maertens

Ceysson & Bénétière
10 rue des Aciéries
42000 Saint-Étienne