I paint myself, therefore I am

I, Henri Landier, French, European painter and engraver, and citizen of this world that I have travelled so much!

I follow a long path of faces planted on the surface of these canvases, like so many seeds of myself, in the vast garden of my life as an artist. We are apparently all together, so many similarities, but nevertheless we are all different from each other, sometimes even strangers to each other...

We are so many mutations of the same stock, so many stages in the evolution of a unique being of flesh and bone who, without respite for decades, makes his reverence to a fascinating and demanding discipline: Painting.

I am therefore I paint. I am in the painting, I am the Painting.

I am lying in it: it drapes me, envelops me, shapes me. It is my body, my face, my muscles, my nerves, my blood. It circulates in me and around me. It is my doubts, my tensions, my hopes, my joy! My certainties, my renunciations, my desires. It is both my anguish and my serenity. With her I am a miraculous alchemist: I decant, I depulp and re-pulp myself, I filter myself. Why so much perseverance and application to do this for so many years? Because in life I am lost, and thanks to painting I find myself: I know where I am going and what I want.

For the former sailor that I am, Painting is both the vessel by which I navigate through the harshness of life, and the infinite ocean that carries me and my hopes. Oh, I know that I am only one pilot among others in this vast world, and I respect the law of numbers. But I have my own roadmap in mind and I am holding my course, even in heavy weather. Look at the big, beautiful wake I've left behind me! And it's not even closed! Don't tell me that this long and hard journey wasn't worth it! I am not saying this out of pride, because born in the land of modesty I am incapable of doing so. I say it so that you remember that my work is the coin of a piece: this hard price paid to snatch the freedom to trace my path. 60 years later, this work is there and well there, it is undeniable.

I paint myself, and in so doing I paint my freedom to paint: in the extravagance and greed of colour, in the search for postures or in an ordinary staging, in transvestism or in reality, in the exuberance of motifs or in simplicity, in joy and humour or in dull gravity.

At the time of the contemporary art fashion for "multiples", my difference is that I multiply myself but without ever copying myself, because in my long life there have been several Henri Landiers who have sprung from this body, from this thought, from this hand with a knife that crushes my pictorial flesh on the canvas, that shapes my innumerable faces, that splits them into bright or muted colours, in order to better contemplate and stare at me.

I have this capacity to give birth to myself because Painting is my generous womb, the place where my soul is always fertilized by the gesture that carries this almost organic matter that has the power to generate me, infinitely if I had the desire and especially the time...

What I want to say with all these myself thrown to your amazed, circumspect or simply curious eyes? That any subject is good to take, but that the portrait of the painter by himself is the most singular of all: a game of regular updates on his mortal fate and the perspective of his painting in constant evolution. It is a way of putting oneself entirely into his work, of literally diving into it, in an attempt to survive by confronting the waves of time that gradually submerge him. And to suggest that my painting will stand firm and not be carried away as easily as I am.

My self-portraits are also glimpses of my long journey as an artist. They constitute, all together, the intimate travel diary of my life as a man through time and art that I chose to investigate nearly sixty years ago. Each self-portrait is a stage in my life and my creation. Each self-portrait is a fertile manifesto, a new birth, and already, also, a death certificate. For my personality drifts slowly like the continents do, and the transformation of my features, my concerns and my plastic intention make it move on an invisible planisphere: one day here, tomorrow there, all my human, sensory, emotional, intellectual and physical content moves inexorably. Where will I be in the near future? I don't know. Let's not talk about the distant future. I do know, however, that I am no longer any of the men depicted: they are all the Henri Landiers of another time (I should say "other times") that I have dissolved in my own painting. Their hearts beat on the surface of these taut skins, and their representations are the ever-vibrant ethers of my soul of that time, lying, huddled, in the hollow of these forms in their time seen, envisaged, willed and finally traced.

These self-portraits, which mark out my space-time, also speak of our innumerable secret meetings. When I say "our" I mean Painting, Time and the great universal Brotherhood of Painters in which I include myself. I regularly invite all these beautiful people to my studio. The great Brotherhood of Painters authorises me to summon to my side the great master portraitists of the past: Rembrandt, Duper, Della Francesca, Van der Weyden, Van Eyck and so on... They come to me by the great staircase which links the present time to all the times of painting, and we converse. I sometimes borrow their hats, their blouses, their ornaments, or their attitudes. It is I, the living one, who holds the brush, while they, the great minds, comment on my work in progress, inject their ideas, their compositions, their "tricks". And I stay focused and work harder not to disappoint them. I have given birth to so many untouchable Landiers under the nose of the Grim Reaper that they will overwhelm her without difficulty at the slightest of her attempts against them. As for me, she can take me away now that I have sprinkled my soul to the four winds: I await her serenely.

Daniel Pirrotta

Je me peins donc je suis
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