Frederic Husseini talks about his art in this conversation with his friend and fellow painter Daisy Abi Jaber, recorded one winter’s evening.
D.AJ. Since the Renaissance architects have made way for the work of painters and sculptors. It seems the profession of architect is incomplete, hence this need for activity in three directions, the three arts – architecture, painting and sculpture. Has the fact that you’re an architect led you to this architectural adaptation of colour?
F.H. I’m an architect who paints and a painter who is aware of the visual necessities of creativity. But beyond those two roles, painting for me is primarily a selfish pleasure. I interact with the medium, the materials and myself. It’s a serious game and a silent conversation, given rhythm by the sound of the tools. Everyone can paint, everyone should paint. It’s a moment of anxiety and relaxation all at once, a detachment from the real world, a journey in one place, a considered diversion. You have to shed all constraints and models and let yourself be carried away by the painting and the way it’s evolving before your eyes.
D.AJ. The distance from reality is constrained by experience, often that of difficult relations with the real world. Hence the act of painting or creating a world that’s tailor-made, sometimes even autistic – a “silent conversation”, a “serious game”… We paint to free ourselves from our constraints and not everyone can do it, unless it becomes a matter of gratuitous acts and gestures.
F.H. It’s hard for me to talk about my painting, I feel as though I’m already talking about memories. Once the moment of creation is gone, the pleasure is over, ended, frozen at a stage considered definitive, but frozen all the same.
That’s why I try to formalize the process itself as far as possible, without any theatrical actionism. This is the main subject of my painting.
Undoubtedly all that’s left are snatches that evoke what might have happened (and in which no one is interested), the way a party is evoked when we look at confetti, or the way, when we see a photo of the end of a race, we imagine how it might have gone.
I think the viewer’s imagination is freer than that of the artist who has “finished” his work; the imagination of viewers is fresh, independent and disinterested. If their sensibilities or curiosity are aroused, they can let themselves be drawn in and wander in their own way through the fabric woven by the artist. Perhaps that’s all art is – a particular dialogue with particular people; a dialogue that’s aimless, gratuitous, sometimes fleeting, like the pleasures of life, and sometimes stronger, like a feeling.
D.AJ. So is it just a game? Entertainment?
F.H. Oh no! There’s more to this game than play. It has to be invented and set in place, like writing and composition, but it has the power to convey nothing and represent only itself, with no message or figuration. Just like music.
D.AJ. So you’re saying it’s the listening eye. A beautiful work of art can’t be explained, even if it’s abstract it isn’t trying to prove anything; it addresses our sensibility rather than our intelligence. What is that a picture of? What does it mean? What’s its message? How can we get away from these questions and accept that art is primarily there to be loved and not to be understood?
F.H. My paintings don’t depict anything. I don’t make anything up, but all the same the world of images that surrounds us sometimes makes us unwittingly confuse painting with representation. It’s hard to see anything other than the world we live in. Or else we invent imaginary worlds, in which we exist as a viewer, but don’t actually live in. We need to see without getting involved, just see. That’s abstraction: it has no reference points or recognizable forms.
Art is everywhere in the places and objects of our lives. It’s the game and process of creation that we seek in the gratuitous act of painting. This is how chance emerges, in all its sweet uncontrollability, with nothing functional about it, like dreams compared to real life. Reality is nice, but still in dreams and even in nightmares we enjoy seeing a dimension that is beyond our grasp, and wandering creatively in spite of ourselves.
D.AJ. In the times we live in there’s no need for painting to be instructive, descriptive, historical or dramatic – no need for “painting” at all, we could say. And yet easel painting remains necessary. It’s an art that’s not dependent on architecture or social trends. It embodies something quintessential that lives, breathes and seeks itself in individuals who create. Can they still put their stamp on their period and innovate?
F.H. We can’t reinvent all the artistic movements of the 20th century, but we can soak them up and continue them, sometimes enrich them. Today art is pointlessly trying to find itself. It shouldn’t be doing that, there’s art everywhere and that’s great! People produce it every day in all societies. Be it minor or major, art is a human need – like spirituality perhaps. In fact the two are closely linked.
In a way it’s this minor, everyday art that I refer to in my paintings. Primary art, in the noble sense – the art of the mason, the craftsman, knowledge and skill, art that isn’t art, raw, abstract art.
D.AJ. So it’s a demystification of art. Does this art with a small “a” need a particular language and instructions to be appreciated?
F.H. There are no capital letters in art, we love what we love. But, like love, art can generate a prolific literature. I think it’s good to talk about it now and then. It’s good gymnastics for the eyes, a good way of exploring our perception of things and getting into what art is doing, through words. The eye doesn’t just listen, it talks too!
D.AJ. You seem to have made your own tools for building, cementing, sculpting and scratching your painting, in line with the process you invented and particularly your conception of the work of art as a physical object.
F.H. Yes, it’s all part of the same thing, an integrated approach. I’ve devised a register and “tools” that I use as my vocabulary: Trace, Imprint, Mark/Rhythm, Cadence, Cut, Repetition, Permanence, Recurrence, Addition, Eradication, Superimposition, Destruction, Construction, Structure, Scratching, etcetera.
All these actions linked to form, substance and texture are part of the creation of “elements” that constitute the picture as a particular space-time. Geometry dominates – it’s the preserve of human beings, unlike the natural curved forms all around us.
It’s this permanent presence of human action that produces the interplay of before-during-after and provides the temporal dimension. With this “toolkit”, there are endless variations. The subject is the painting itself, displayed and inviting a plurality of ways of seeing – one piece of writing, with many readings.
D.AJ. The world is round, life goes in cycles, viciousness is circular – why do you insist on playing straight?
F.H. So I can play a double game!
December 2007