On Some of Daniel Enkaoua’s Paintings
Essential
First of all, to get to the essential point: Daniel Enkaoua’s painting is spiritual painting.
I’d even go so far as to say it has a high degree of spirituality. These are visions,
wrested from time through a technical work of enormous resilience. And given over to
the gaze through an urge for colour that is at least as much the reproduction of the sun
as a kind of energy to do with life and love. A lengthy and courageous contemplation of
the mystery—of the mystery that’s right here—at the same time as a humble and
grateful joy in form, in the beauty of the world, of its fruits, of its landscapes and of that
which sums it all up: the human face.
If we were to question the memory of a mirror by asking it, when it is blank and
dark, Show us what you’ve retained in your obscure depths of the faces that have passed
before you at some point in time, the mirror would show us something akin to a
painting by Daniel Enkaoua. An image freed from space that floats or glistens, like a
hologram, in the silent atmosphere of memory.
Technique
The technique is undoubtedly virtuoso. The extremely patient juxtaposition and
superimposition of paradoxically bold and brisk brushstrokes, colours and light effects
obtained indirectly by the knowing and sometimes unconventional association of values.
It is virtuoso and knowing, indeed. It can amaze. It certainly commands respect
and admiration. But what’s much better is that in the end it no longer has importance.
Because it completely disappears in what it causes to appear. This is the rationale and
the secret of a painting that is above the claims of any school and of any sort of
arrogance. (Don’t talk to me, a hundred and fifty years later, about Impressionism!). It’s
no longer a technique. It’s feeling and creative volition.
An agreement arrived at between what the world does and what painting does.
As is fitting, technique in Enkaoua is to the picture what the voice is to speech.
The voice is worked, beautiful, warm, singular, sometimes breaking, vibrant,
sometimes even afraid, but above all it makes speech possible. It makes it appear. Voice
becomes meaning, sharing: speech. Enduring. The voice is still a temporal creature, but
with speech the disappearing voice has engendered what lasts and persists, what
modifies the passing of time, what does not give in to it.
This is what should be asked of technique: that it create speech, and that it be the
most perfect means of expression possible of its creation.
Technique, in the contemporary context, of course, must no longer be perceived
as a situation in the history of art, but as the search for and the assuming of an
appropriate timbre of the voice which makes speech audible, meaningful and suggestive.
Figuration, transfiguration
I place an apple on the table, says the poet. I look at it. I get inside. Such tranquillity!
What the poet says, the painter can do. Hence these famous Four Quinces,
which are something else. Or the rather mystical Montserrat Tomatoes, grown in the
finest “Chardin.”1
You can only paint things from the inside on two conditions, which is a way of
living: by seeing everything as a dwelling, and feeling you are a dweller in everything.
A moral position devolves from these two conditions: humility. For you can
only dwell somewhere by making yourself smaller than where it is you dwell.
Deriving, once more, from this moral position is the closeness of the artist to the
mystery of the world. For it is by making yourself a dweller in everything that you rub
shoulders with what, in point of fact, haunts everything: this unknowable, omnipresent
spirit.
Of course, for all this you need a gift and talent. But you also need, on top of
that and in an ongoing, prolonged sort of way, a total commitment of your will and of
your existence, generosity, the sacrifice of which is great, courageous and difficult, and
the reward for which is actually minuscule: a sense of grace that secretly touches the
heart and which, offered to the eyes and vice-versa, vibrates in the aura of the painting.
Of the image.
Face of what is
1
The writer puns on Chardin (the 18th-century still life painter) and jardin (garden)
[Trans.]
Enkaoua’s fame stems from with his portraits, full-length or facial. Which seems wholly
justified to me. But what place may we attribute, then, to his still lifes and his
landscapes?
Exactly the same place, in my opinion. Let me try and explain.
Enkaoua’s work has little to do with playing the ideas game. By the idea I mean
something extremely negative in art, that is a message or an interpretation not
represented or fixed in advance, eventually announced in the title, and of which the
painting serves, rather basely, a bit mechanically, as an illustration. All the same, this
happens: for instance The Origin of the World (not included in this exhibition), a large
painting depicting a cabbage and a leek that, happily, despite its title and the ironic
reference to Courbet, is an enormously gentle painting—a beautiful piece of work,
which would be lacking in nothing were it to forego its title.
For the idea is a programme and it enslaves the image. The idea is a force that
reinforces from without, like scaffolding, and paradoxically weakens the work. When
from the first it doesn’t turn out to be its intrinsic weakness. Daniel Enkaoua’s work is
marvellously, miraculously devoid of this obsession with the idea, which in my opinion
is the leprosy of contemporary art. His is an art that speaks in silence, not an art that
responds, illustrates, fools around or repeats itself.
Enkaoua’s silent art watches, watches insistently, until that which it watches
becomes a watching presence.
Whence, of course, the seen as well as seeing nature of his portraits. And their
closeness, at times, to the tremendous, equally watchful, vigilant presence of Faiyum
portraits or to other ancient works, particularly Roman and Byzantine (Sara, 2012; or
the spectacular Natan Looking at the Palette, 2012).
This is an art that gets under way when the painter finds himself being seen by
what he sees. When, from what he contemplates, he’s brought out the living, seeing
being.
This is a discovery that’s neither easy nor reassuring. Which even contains a
form of violence, a backlash of sorts. The gaze sinks into what it sees, until suddenly,
brusquely, by an echo effect, by a boomerang effect, by repercussion or by revelation, a
gaze is fixed upon it.
To adequately render the stupefaction of this discovery of the return of the gaze,
you’d perhaps have to compare it to the inevitable surprise of someone who, groping
around in a dark room, seeks the switch that controls a spotlight he knows in advance,
through experience, to be blinding. The sudden flood of light elicits a sense of wonder
and a magnificent, painful bedazzlement.
What could be more striking, in this regard, than the immense, distressing
absence emanating from The Red Jacket, 2003?
At one with this reading of Enkaoua’s art as the investigation and representation
of a gaze advancing towards the spectator, his entire oeuvre is related to a dominant
form of energy: the revelation of what, since this “what” exists, watches us.
It’s perfectly understandable, then, for this investigation to be manifested first
and foremost in the painting of what, par excellence, watches: the human figure and
particularly its face.
(In passing, I note that it’s not only a matter of showing the gaze via the eyes
that watch, which are often, moreover, blurry: it’s the whole image that watches).
And likewise it also follows that the painter creates essentially the same thing
when he paints an empty chair, a humble kitchen table, a stick of celery. Or, up to and
including a totally sublime stage, a vast landscape. By managing to extend, to all that
exists, the strength and the virtue of the face.
To my mind, a landscape by Enkaoua is just as much a portrait. For the painted
earth has the dignity of a face.
Prayer
I shall add, as a coda, a brief remark about one of the affects that impresses me the most
in the expressiveness of Enkaoua’s watching canvases: entreaty.
The gaze the painter discovers in all the things that, theoretically, he knows so
well, which are so close to him (his wife, his children, his objects, his region), seems
quite often to be an entreating one. In light of this, the gaze discovered in the face of
what exists is similar to an insistent plea, to a universal prayer.
An act of thanksgiving, perhaps, yet caught up in a troubling feeling of distress,
often fragile and vulnerable, impossible to formulate, forceful and poignant. A fragile
prayer, surprised and tenacious, which resonates in the slightest touch, and reminds us,
each of us, each and every time, from heart to heart, of our intimate personal
responsibility.
GRÉGOIRE POLET