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A SINGULAR COLLECTIVE
Summary
SÉROUX
David REALH
Alex SVI
Zorah SOMEXKI
Paul QWEST
Others
Marcel Proust and our plural personality - by André Maurois
The new Me's are sometimes so different that they should have a different name.
You have seen on stage those dancers whose dress is white but which, because it passes successively through the lights of several spotlights, seems to us in turn yellow, green or blue.
The same is true of human beings
Anyone who thinks they are themselves is mistaken,
I am diverse and I do not belong to myself.
Fernando Pessoa
There are at least three beings in me:
a contemplative, a man of action,
and the third is waiting for the right moment
to manifest itself.
Dany Laferrière
Life, smash to pieces
analysis
Here, form is substance
The singularity
Séroux is one of Jean Séroux's heteronyms.
A painter, draughtsman and photographer, he maintains an endless conversation with his other heteronyms, thanks to whom he forms a collective that allows him to visualise an incredible variety of intimate sensibilities.
Definition
A heteronym is a pseudonym that develops a life of its own as a distinct entity with a unique personality and sensibility. Each heteronym has its own technique, its own style, its own ideas, its own impulses, its own way of perceiving.
The precedent of Fernando Pessoa
The Portuguese writer (1888 - 1935) is a famous author of heteronyms. They were more than just pen names for Pessoa.
The most notable were :
Alberto Caeiro, nature poet.
Ricardo Reis, classicist and stoic.
Álvaro de Campos, modern and futuristic.
Bernardo Soares, author and "assistant".
These "writers of the possible" enabled him to escape the stereotypical identity assignments of his time.
States of the Self
Like Pessoa and other writers such as Romain Gary, Séroux has chosen to name his heteronyms according to his different "States of the Self":
- Child state
- Adult state
- Parent state
Defined by psychiatrist Eric Bernstein, the founder of transactional analysis in the 1960s, these states help us to better understand the diversity of our relationships with the world, with others and with ourselves.
The collective
Séroux, the adult state
David Reahl, the child state
Alex Svi, the parent state
Zorah Somexki represents the collective memory through her collection of found photographs,
Paul Qwest orchestrates these different sensibilities through assemblages in the form of polyptychs.
Several other heteronyms also appear.
All are presented below.
1 / SÉROUX
The eloquence of silence
His thinking is organised. His representations are structured in a figurative, rational way, based on perspective. It conveys emotion, avoiding the impulsive reactions of the child state, which David Realh takes into account. His perception conveys a kind of melancholy that can make you think of emptiness, from behind.
Painting
Drawing
Photography
2 / DAVID REALH
How can I stop asking questions ?
It expresses authentic and spontaneous desires, fears, joys, suffering, impulses and memories. He feeds on emotional reactions, in response to external stimuli perceived as provocations. His drawings suggest an artist who lives each stroke, each line as a means of living out his obsessions through an acute spatial sense. Especially in the complex scenes, this causes the trashy backgrounds to topple and bend as the figures rush towards us...
He who hides his madman dies speechless.
Henri Michaux
The creative process can be described as a temporary, compulsory psychosis. So it's no accident that the artist is "mad": it's a necessity. More often than not, he will not remain in the state of madness; he will merely pass through it; sometimes he will linger. But his norm as an artist always requires him to go through an essential syncopation, a real collapse of the spirit, from which the new will emerge.
Better still, only the new can emerge from this chaos.
This eclipse that shatters consciousness is the very condition of the creative act.
Anton Ehrenzweig - The Hidden Order of Art
More than the all-too-excellent 'knowing how to think' of the metaphysicians, it is the dementias, the retardations, the deliriums, the ecstasies and the agonies, the 'no longer knowing how to think', that we are really called upon to discover.
Jean-pierre Martin, Henri Michaux, Gallimard 2003
3 / ALEX SVI
The "Talmudist" in the team expresses himself in typographic form. He explores the attitudes, beliefs, values, norms, criticisms and benevolences he has inherited and assimilated from his upbringing in the broadest sense by asking questions.
Alex Svi asks questions.
He asks them, he asks them again, he transposes them. And that's all there is to it. Ever since Maurice Blanchot and L'Entretien infini (1969), we've known that "The answer is the misfortune of the question".
By dint of asking questions, we generally end up imagining that we are hearing answers: a major problem here with 'voices' that speak in silence and have never lacked listeners.
Clément Rosset
Le réel, traité de l'idiotie.
Alberto Manguel's point of view
- Curiosity
What is consciousness? What happened before the Big Bang? Will science and engineering give us back our individuality? How will we cope with the proliferation of the world's population? Do prime numbers follow a pattern? Can we make scientific thinking universal? How can we ensure that society survives and flourishes? Can anyone adequately explain the meaning of infinite space? Will I be able to record my brain like I record a television program? Can mankind reach the stars?
The first characteristic of the Talmud is this constant diffluence of the text, this systematic practice of one thing leading to another, the impression of perfect disjointedness.
Gérard Haddad
a portrait of New York / 2015
4 / ZORAH SOMEXKI
Involuntary memory
Zorah Somexki presents historical and intimate memories through her collection of found, anonymous photographs. The photographs are used as they are, and sometimes graphically reproduced.
An artwork without an artist
Sometimes a work of art has no intention whatsoever, but its quality is there for all to see. It opens doors for us that sometimes only we can see.
ANONYMOUS SILVER PHOTOGRAPHS
Film censorship in the '70s
5 / PAUL QWEST
Bring together and orchestrate
Paul Qwest is the curator of the ensemble and claims this activity as an Art in its own right. A former art history teacher, he is also a writer and collector. He establishes the coherence of the various productions by arranging paintings, drawings, photographs and various objects in the form of meaningful ensembles, subject by subject.
The 'work' is based on the interactions
Everything is based on the interactions between the components of the arrangements. The aim is to broaden the meaning of the composition, like a film montage through an art of relationships, in much the same way as the juxtaposition of words in a sentence produces meaning.
COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY
The matches that Paul Qwest organises establish 'consistency', similar to the principle formulated by Leon Festinger in his theory of cognitive dissonance. The aim is to establish cohesion between attitudes and behaviours when faced with different types of information. This narrative mechanism refers to the mind's tendency to create narratives.
THE INNER WORLD OF THE NARRATION
Daniel Schacter's research into the construction of identity is based on the 'self-narrative'. These 'narratives' shape our identity to maintain a smooth, coherent image, both in time and in social space.
Using the fragmentary productions of the collective's personalities, Paul Qwest allows meaning to crystallise in the viewer's mind.
The Qwest Collection
Depending on his research and the concepts he develops, Paul Qwest gathers documentation and various objects that are incorporated into his designs. Here are a few examples.
6 / Others
For a particular project, an unexpected search, Séroux gives himself a new heteronym that meets a particular circumstance.
MAX GABHOR
The circumstance
In a conversation in 2015 with a feminist philosopher friend of hers, she explained how sexuality without stakes, the free sharing of pleasures between desiring adults, remains an "illusion" for women.
In other words, from her point of view, the relationship with the body remains a territory of seduction, of symbolic and practical trade with the other, a means of exchange most often aimed at something other than feminine pleasure.
Max
Surprised by this assertion and defending the opposite, with the help of writer Elisa Brune, Séroux meets a gigolo who charges a fee for his talents to women who want a "no-stakes" relationship.
The paradox is that the freedom to be - for his clients - is greater than in their marital sexuality, for example. On the strength of this shared experience, under the name Max Gabhor, Séroux placed an ad on the Internet to document the free expression of anonymous individual female desires through photography.
The process
- The announcement was explicit;
- So was the artistic work.
- Each of the people we met, who appreciated the approach, authorised image rights on condition that they remained anonymous. The same protocol was agreed upon each time. The desire to "her" was always expressed beforehand according to the mood of the moment.
The staging of the event was done jointly. Everything was free and unrestricted, and nothing was faked. We debriefed together afterwards and often repeated the act.
Artworks
This work met her question. It was the spirit that counted, and the sharing of experience with those who had given themselves a special escape for a time.
For them, the essential part of life is elsewhere, even if this exploration was important.
A very large collection of digital photographs has been built up over the years.
Like Zorah Somexki's collection of found photographs, this is a work in itself.
