"To paint in the spirit of ABSTRACTION is to fight ignorance, refusing: vague and uncertain terms, artistic vagueness, amnesia and confusion, which always leads the way to backward-looking and reactionary attitudes" (N. Dolla 1977).
Noël Dolla's exhibition is composed of two versions, or more precisely two parts. Two hangings of his new painting series, but it is also the occasion, in the second version, to show in a "fixed" and not ephemeral form his traveling exhibition Offshore [1] made of paintings, stacked photographs "available for consultation on site" and the video transcription of the Offshore performance with the already famous Coco Bel oeil.
Despite or thanks to the presence of photos and video in both parts, the Veiled Sun exhibitions are definitely painting exhibitions.
The series of paintings: Fait à la 2, 4, 6, 8, has its origin in the first series of 'Giraffes' painted in R. Flexner's studio in NY during the spring of 1996.
Between 1997 and 2003, Noël Dolla left the incredible problems that this series of paintings posed for him fallow.
It was at the request of Christian Bernard, for his retrospective at the MAMCO in Geneva during the winter of 2002/2003, an exhibition with the premonitory title of NON, that he showed for the first time a work from this series. He owes it to the staging of this exhibition, masterfully conceived by C.Bernard, to have SEEN with a new eye how much these paintings carried almost infinite possibilities starting from a simple and radical minimalist act. Gesture which consists in putting a masking in two pieces to form ENTONNOIRS with painting which will be. Saturated with colors, singing at the top of his voice: Antonin started the smoke funnel.
Each form born from this first gesture applied on the virgin cotton canvas, induces the following one, as well as the poetic becoming of these paintings. Here there is no compromise, no turning back, no stringiness, just the possibility of moving forward, knowing that each gesture, each color overdetermines the future of this chess game. Noël Dolla knows from the first gesture that there will not necessarily be a winner but that the painter must never be put mate by himself.
It is only a question here and now of playing a superb game that has no more reason to stop than it had to start.
It is a question here of painting with the memory of Paolo Ucello as the source of the chromatic perspective. Of Titian for the deconstruction of the painting. From Matisse and the question of Happiness. From Cézanne and the Sainte Victoire Mountains as a basis for reflection for the suspended gesture. From Barnett Newman and the limits of a simple zip, to reach the sublime. Of Ad Reinhardt's consciousness and his dark poetry of black that potentiates the question of white from Malevitch to Rayman (Is the painter in buildings the king of monochrome)? It is simply a question here of pissing off the beautiful painting by thinking like Marcel Duchamp, Gérard Gasiorowski or Philippe Mayaux. Painting is an act of resistance for those who refuse amnesia, the end of history, the death of art.
Noël Dolla's painting practice is that of an artist who still believes that life has a meaning. It is the painting of one who affirms that history is written every day in the poet's kitchen, in the writer's room, in the painter's studio, in the researcher's laboratory, but also at the factory, at school or at the office.
Noël Dolla will also unveil works on paper, some kind of painted haiku, breaths composed of three to five forms laid down in a breath and a firm gesture on a thick sheet of blank vellum. Light works like a tarlatan veil on a school board. These watercolors underline the question of emptiness, of the white and the fatal moment of the stop. When should the hand stop making contact with the support? Painting with watercolor (like Cézanne) is a beautiful exercise to try to learn to slow down and then stop playing.
This exhibition, painted entirely with the artist's left hand (he laughs), marks the absolute refusal of just-in-time production. Each of these works must be as unique as each living being on this earth. It is in this that the work of art deserves to be sanctified.
Noël Dolla says "NO to mechanical reproduction, NO to the multiplication of painted Little Ones. NO to immediate profit, NO to over-productivity, fuck the GDP. One must have the will to paint so that tomorrow a young girl, a little boy, an old man can still marvel at a work of art that is several decades or hundreds of years old".
"Death to the clowns of art, death to the kings of cloning, the singers of productivity. The art must be thought and realized totally in the opposite of the postmodern current, pure product and of the globalist capitalism for the moment still triumphant. They strangle the animal and then they pity it saying, the poor they do not manage to breathe anymore.
Today Fidel Castro, a few others and I are considered old-fashioned, but we know that we are right"[2].
Once again Noël Dolla tells us: "what you see may not be what you think."
[1] Off Shore, traveling exhibition, Paris on 6-02-2004, Tours on 7, St Etienne on 9, Sète on 10, Nice on 11
[2] N.Dolla " The word said by an eye " Ed L'Harmattan 1995.