Gilles TEBOUL

Éric Suchère "Here, a paint that fades from pink to orange from top to bottom. Here, another, pale green paint that is becoming increasingly saturated. Here, another deep blue turning almost black. Here again, a violet that is adorned with an orange ochre halo, or green on the edges, or a diffuse luminescence barely perceptible. Or: how a blue lights up, becomes shine of the hue in the most natural way possible, as if nothing had caused it, as if it emanated from the hue itself. The paintings of Gilles Teboul are that, are only that, «pure nails very high dedicating their onyx»: a color that appears and modulates on a restricted surface, framed, orthogonal in an opposition between the diffusion of the color that causes an unmeasured space and the limit of the object painting that encloses it and the frame – “that in oblivion closed by the frame is fixed”. The painting is a limit in the unlimited, sometimes underlined by a slight whiteness on the edges, sometimes a shine. These paintings do not question – to use a stereotype of art criticism and mediation – nor do they question. They are only a tone that diffuses, migrates, absorbs the light, sends it back, turns off or radiates, changes according to the light, asserts itself or abolishes itself. They are nothing but colorful and luxurious fantasies that only reveal what they are. If the painting deposited on the canvas is material, the spectacle it offers partly denies this materiality, as the colour appears immaterial and denies the matter that carries it. Especially as the resinous surface seems to place the color in a cloudy space. The color seems to us, from a distance, on the surface and, from close behind a surface that is not perceived. The color is on the surface and behind the surface, buried in the depth of matter but without being able to locate where. This ambiguity between the bottom and the surface gives the feeling that the bottom is rising to the surface and that the surface is engulfing itself. Painting, thus, puts the gaze at a distance, creates a distance between the material object we design – the canvas – and the disorder of what we perceive – the phantasmagoria. In this sense, painting is both object and image, a real and an unreal. A colored object is there that dissolves into itself and becomes its own image. It is not the image of an aurora borealis, a sunset or some natural spectacle, or even its equivalent, and not more than a transposition, but of a coloured surface that is both itself and creates its own image of itself-even, here and there, both here and not here. All this amplified by the brilliance of the surface – “that hard forgotten lake that haunts under the frost” – which, while adding a distance to the color, reflects the surrounding space, you, me, as well as the painting that might be in front of you and accentuates the idea – perceived first – of the image as a reflection. The painting of Gilles Teboul is a real and a reflection, a real and its reflection and we look at it, we focus on it as much as we dive into it, both on and in. It is a utopia in the literal sense of the term, without place, in the absence of place – “Phantom that to this place its pure brilliance assigns”. The object is made and discarded, ceaselessly, in the act of looking, constantly swinging between these two states, poor object of canvas, resin and pigment and absolute of its cancellation. What we see refers, in this, to the realization of works. Gilles Teboul designed a chemistry, a mixture of resin and pigments that he pours on a canvas placed on the ground, canvas that he weds so that it is the most horizontal. It is necessary to wait the next day for the mixture to reveal the color and its modulations and for the painting – the pictorial object – to appear to the painter. Even if a result is expected, the mixture, the temperature, a slight slope... will produce an effect that is not totally predictable – successful or not. There is an act of deposition and a moment of revelation. The thing is deposited, material, and revealed at the same time materially. The color eventually emerged and settled, became surface and image. It has appeared and this is what we are witnessing dumbfounded and silent as what is there is unnameable, is just."

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