Frédéric Heurlier Cimolai

ALL THE TEXTURES OF THE WORLD

Frédéric Heurlier Cimolaï is a painter: he creates paintings.  Shape comes into play, but also history.  When using a blank canvas to attempt to create space on a flat surface, the first gesture is just one in a long chain of many, in which memory guides the hand. Heurlier Cimolaï’s first move is to center the work.  He traces a sort of limit at the heart of the canvas that restrains the pictorial field of vision, and acts like a frame painted within the material frame, a priori the stretched canvas.  It’s a way to inscribe the work in what Brice Marden refers to as the “Spartan limitations” of the painting.  All comes together precisely in this spot and the viewer cannot leave the space, nor sidestep it:  it is here in this zone that everything plays out.  It is also a manner to enter more deeply into the work:  by this inaugural gesture, the initial canvas is transformed into a painting, and the simple plane in space is used to reveal depth.  It remains clear, and artist never tries to make us totally forget, that he is working on a flat surface, as this flatness is the very nature of a painting.  Frédéric Heurlier Cimolaï begins to build, laying down a few simple shapes on his canvas, like strata in a multi-level space, which gradually come together to create the composition.  Construction is a question of due measure:  there is equilibrium of course, but also a fragile stability, a mix of weight and lightness.  The right balance must be found so that the work remains a painting rather than becoming a purely static image:  it is living matter, animated like a breath of life.

When Frédéric Heurlier Cimolaï paints, using a few shapes dispersed like an underlying architectural structure reinforcing his canvas in this deliberately carved out space; it allows him to give free reign to his joy in participating in the long history of this thing we call a painting.  He uses tempera; a technique previously used to paint icons, or for working on materials like plaster or wood.  The artist is aware of this and his work carries the weight of memory.  Beholding his large scale paintings the viewer is reminded of a fresco, of the feeling of a fresco.  This is not necessarily due to the visual appearance, but rather the sensation:  the quality of the surface that is inherent to painting.  Viewing a work by Frédéric Heurlier Cimolaï is indeed all about sensations:  we of course see a play of shapes that appear and then are hidden, but there is most importantly a call to take to the time to truly see, to intentionally lose one’s self in the work.  We feel, because from one form to another, from one color to another, the painter never ceases to offer additional sensations:   soft or rough, smooth or hard, or silky.  His work contains all the many textures of the world, in the space of one painting.

Pierre Wat