Essentialism or the contemporary artist of the XXIst century


To the opposite of the existentialists for who man feels like a foreigner on Earth, causing disgust, despair, existential absurdity, the contemporary artist opts -by inner necessity- for man faithful to Earth, the essentialist, who is equipped with a palette on which emerge the color of suffering but also the color of joy, the color of elation, the color of love, the color of enthusiasm, the color of grace (sometimes).

The force of Primitivism -school of the contemporary artist with a full consciousness of his time- is taken from a game between the affirmation of differences and their self-actualization.

The essentialist mind :

1) expression of the inner necessity

2) refusal of the organicist thought based on biology

3) re-cognition of the thought of man before civilization of writing

4) idea of an initial, original condition which send away to the remote peoples as to what is innate in our deepest being (not the ortho-normal origin!!)

5) responsability of the artist of what he gives to see (his creation) to the public in which there is also children. This intense pleasure to show violence is anti-democratic. An act of violence physical and psychological- has never resolved a conflict

6) anti-Oedipus


Drawing is essential, means "through essence".
Bigger simplification of the drawing, synthesis of forms.
Line which is seen and perceived in the infinitely great and the infinitesimal: mystery of the conjunction.

As Gauguin, conjunction of nature with spirit. Conjunction of faithfulness to senses of the naturalists with desire of a different access, symbolic one, to spirit : ancestral mystery.

Magic conception of art as "catharsis".
Meditation about geometry of primitive sculpture as for example geometry of vegetation and celtic art.
Primitivists don't represent the human figure. Or rather they can represent it in an absolutely geometrical style.

The XXth century praised primitive and popular arts. Until 1950, the inspiration before the increasing number of artworks "for somewhere else" is often imitation.
From the 50's, the religious presence of these artworks is enough for inspiration. Emerge the interest for the drawings of children (the one who are less than 3 years old, before the conceptual form). Nevertheless, the adult wants to rediscover this child' state as a child: Oedipus!
In the XXIst century, fortified by the incommensurable mistakes with the oedipal titillations in the dark, it is a matter of rediscovering this child' state as an adult: the anti-oedipius... Mystery of the conjunction...

Inscribing all the hand has to inscribe. It's from this original chaos alpha -drawing of child- that the apocalyptic order omega can emerge. Until the primitive thought shows the hand to... represent.



Guillevic, 2003