Overview
2019
Oil and chinese ink on wood
Unique Work
Dimensions: 122cm (H) x 244cm (W) x 2cm (D) / 48" (H) x 96.1" (W) x 0.8" (D)
Note: Actual colours may vary due to photography & computer settings.
Artist Statement
To be the best, to succeed again and again, to show your value, your courage, your determination, to be combative, to be polite, to be clean and precise .... Not to be dreamy, not to be utopian, to smile again and always, ..., behave well, do not criticize, think like the others, do not oppose. The world has produced a morality based on Enlightenment reason, where the individual has no other existence than in his personal and individual success and in his acceptance and integration to bourgeois morality. The social contract born of individualism and rationalism has built robots that have no other choice and will except to belong to a group. Though, he does not stop to remove himself from the group, trapped in a quest for self-perfection. The individual was supposed, by science, to become master of nature, and by morality to make himself master of himself. It seems to me that it is time for human beings to be released from this tutelage that has only separated it from its natural and social environment. It is time for human beings to accept the power of determinism or chaos. Human beings are not free. Their only way to be free will not be through consciousness and reason but through the understanding of the unconscious which records, much more than the consciousness, the informations from our external and internal environment. The automatism used here for the writing is an attempt, an "invisible hand", the desire to write the unconscious by freeing it from the social constraints that fix it in limited, strict, geometric areas.
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Artist Profile
Born: 1979
Hometown: LA VIEILLE LOYE
Based in: Kaohsiung
Born in France in 1979, Thomas Pourcelot returned to Taiwan in 2016 after three years spent in Riyadh. This stage in the Middle East can be added to the list of cities (Graz, Pointe-à-Pitre, Beijing, Seoul, and Kaohsiung) where he has lived during the last fifteen years. The artist often compares this itinerant mania to the "praise of flight" of Henri Laborit. Deconstructivism adapted to the real life, it is therefore a series of constructions, deconstructions and pragmatic regenerations which founded his life and career. Self-discovery, a quest for the meaning of his life, Thomas Pourcelot began painting as an escape from real life. Dichotomous personality and artist, torn between passion and reason, between conscious and unconscious desires, he asks himself how our choices are made as individuals and citizens, and tries to find a compromise between the two.
Inspired by modern art, contemporary art but also by primitive arts, his works have been gradually oriented towards "semi-automatism" and abstract expressionism. His studies have not led him to explore the arts or his techniques, he is a self-taught artist who relies more on his feelings than on the "culture of the spirit". Jean Jacques Rousseau said: "I have but one faithful guide on which I can depend: this is the chain of the sentiments by which the succession of my existence has been marked ... I cannot be deceived in what I have felt, nor in that which from sentiment I have done; and to relate this is the chief end of my present work... "
His approach here is largely empirical. Nothing is really premeditated. The canvas is built little by little, almost by itself, according to cravings, needs and accidents. The goal is neither to translate thoughts, emotions nor to convey a message, but rather a personal quest and an ontological approach. His personal experiences, his studies in the social and political sciences and his thoughts on the processes of artistic creation led him, in 2015, to plunge again into questions related to psychoanalysis, political philosophy or sociology. Who speaks in me? Where do I go as an individual or as a social being? How does collective thinking evolve? What is its impact on our individual systems of values? Is human nature a fixed reality or a cultural construction? These questions, largely abandoned by our materialistic societies and only taken up by religions, are, for the artist, at the very heart of the stakes of our humanity.
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