Hugo Baud and Olive Godlee at Espace Sébeillon

Surely Tomorrow is certainly the title of a promise or of an exhibition that might never happen, of a meeting that might never have taken place, of a moment one could wait for an entire lifetime. It is a suspended feeling resting on a simple hope. In any case, I no longer believe in it. I don’t want to believe in it anymore. So I want to make sure things actually happen. I want to remain convinced by what I have before my eyes, things that are the result of considered moments, distinct choices, and deliberate gestures.

The works presented are, I believe, not promises. They belong to the realm of observation, of the moment after. They exist only because something has occurred before. One could speak of a state of prefiguration, neither political nor pictorial, but a prefiguration that offers neither a leap into literary time nor a revolutionary hope, but instead places us in a second state. The thing has already happened, the consequences are here before our eyes, the gestures have been made, the actions have taken place, and the moments have been lived through.

By Olive Godlee’s deliberate choice, the canvases are pinned to the wall like wall-paint splashes, all made of acrylic, and their subjects clearly show situations in which pain is involved. One then wonders whether a child’s pain is a step (an obligatory one?) in the expression of self: basic tantrums and nervous moments as common building blocks of an upbringing (though perhaps this should not be the case). Why not expect a child to be susceptible? Why should it be one of the few ways they have left to express themselves? Godlee captures these crisis and post-crisis moments as a way of measuring intensity: verbal, emotional, and characteristic (again, why should it be characteristic?) of childhood. Even if I believe we should be able to express emotions more spontaneously, it is frustrating to have to impose control. As a fervent supporter of more drama, more chaos, googoo gaga, forever and ever, I am therefore pro-tantrum. I think it is important to express one’s feelings, to let them out: sometimes calmly, but sometimes it’s okay if it’s not calm.

Dramatic is also the whole setup devised by Hugo Baud; mannered is the system he found to show us the backs of paintings. One doubts whether they are paintings at all; one wonders how they hold, and surely that is not what we are meant to look at. The painting, if it exists, is facing the wall, as if punished. All that remains is its reverse: the staples, the folds of the canvas, the drips along the edges, and the tailor-made plank holding up a weight that barely exists. A reference, perhaps, to one of the earliest conceptual gestures in art history The Reverse of a Framed Painting (c. 1670) by Gijsbrechts. Revisited by Baud, it returns to us once again the question of what we are looking at and what the painting is looking at. I look at it turned over, as if burdened by an act that would be sacrilegious: turning a painting around against classical decorum. And it feels good. It frees us from a pressure and releases impulses.

Around the same period as Gijsbrechts’ trompe-l'œil, rabbit-skin glue was invented to size canvases. Here, with one work’s gesso and the other’s acrylic, these are the only pieces of information extracted from the exhibition sheet. So these works, awaiting, surely, a painting, are ready, primed, and protected from the linolenic acid usually present in linseed oil, which destroys cotton canvas fibres. Baud tragically leaves us everything and nothing to see: the backside, the information of fabrication, the way an object is held within a space, or, when not supported by pine planks, monochromes of sized canvases stuck to the wall. Through these gestures, Baud is not insisting on the pretension of painting or speaking about painting; it is rather, in my view, a general unspoken atmosphere. And of course, it is through this refusal that many things are told to us: Baud does not speak about painting, he speaks about us facing painting. He always speaks about us. In these sculptural and activated propositions, a few strokes of gesso are even applied to the front of the backside; on another, the entire set of technical details is tinted yellow acrylic. These very specific gestures integrate themselves into the exhibition in order to dismantle it, with three other canvases placed on the floor. It is in an almost embarrassing balance that Baud’s operations find their monumental strength.

Godlee’s case studies also remind me of Stubbs’ Whistlejacket, hanging in the National Gallery. Almost a century after Gijsbrechts, Stubbs, in English Romanticism, isolates a horse rearing on its hind legs, its torso glowing in dazzling light, all set against a beige background. Realistic perfection in an expanse of absurdity, anchored in nothing. Once again, a conceptual iconography. Godlee also refuses many things through their painting: they refuse the frame of a stretched canvas and resist the Issy Woodification of painting through their interest in the anxious life that unfolds in the hesitant choices of image culture and photographic treatments of painting. Let me explain: it is Barry Schwabsky, in his article on the latter, who introduces the term “perverse realism”: painting relatively dark in temperament, but also often chromatically dark. A balance between the banal and the sinister. Michaël Borremans’ painting would be one of the clearest examples. This perverse realism seems to respond to the current rise of an omnipresent anxiety: here, the child facing the tumults of everyday life, under our adult gaze.

In the perpetual waiting for a moment that must arrive, for a shared reconciliation and dried tears, for a resolved argument and a painting that could appear, for a moment and yet, no, it is this moment that does not move.