The excitement of soft sculpture and considering the undecidable
November 15, 2010

The approach developed by Nicholas Voeikoff – Erens for combining painting and sculpture is both elegant and ingenious. It includes topological elements and fits into the ongoing trend of genre blending and category questioning. Historically, many forms of painted sculpture and especially painted architecture have been known. The Greek temples and statues – among others, those of Athena and Poseidon – were bedecked by intense colouring and so were medieval cathedrals and many wood statues decorating them, before the paint was worn off by the passage of time; and more recently, painters such as Gauguin and Degas added a touch of colour to some of their sculptures, as has Picasso in the twentieth century, the list goes on…

The Montreal artist who describes himself foremost as a painter has also effected a small topological revolution in the contemporary art landscape: thanks to him sculpture has become soft, as it were. The two sides of a pliable sheet are each painted in turn by Voeikoff-Erens and thus neither side can be seen in its entirety, so that at any moment one gets a glimpse of two images… when of course the sheet is not fully and flatly suspended on a vertical surface or a wall and only one surface is seen.

Voeikoff-Erens notes that Claes Oldenburg, the American pop artist with a great reputation through the nineteen-sixties created his own painted soft sculptures by taking recognizable iconic objects of the modern consumer universe – plastic copies of hamburgers, toilet seats, rock band drum kits etc. – and melting them, softening them, turning them into hardly recognizable vinyl objects – a cultural comment, as it were – and this kind of practice of deflected use has in time become a staple of a vast academically-sanctioned artistic world.

What Voeikoff-Erens does is adding a “taste” of the Moebius strip, a hint of the wonders of the branch of math known as topology to his sculpture-painting or painting sculpture: the docile suppleness of his works evokes mathematical perspectives and worlds of thought and imagination, while also reminding us of as mundane an object as a towel or of screens used as dividers and markers of space in dwelling spaces.

His world is one of polysemic evocations, yet one evolved with an elegant economy of means and vocabulary, a “hinting at” rather than a stylistic “shouting”, as a way to looking ahead, to open new views…

Voeikoff-Erens calls the “other side” of the soft double-faced painting the perpetual “hidden side”. “In a museum, the painting is all frontal and all accessible”, notes the painter. The resemblance of the artwork with, let’s say a towel or a poncho, marks it – faintly perhaps – as an object : this puts us ahead in our endeavor to find the implications of Voeikoff’s work, it brings us closer to Duchamp’s idea of the object as a work of art, as museum piece by common agreement… but, in fact Voeikoff-Erens’ paintings actually are paintings, not just objects. They also evoke some mental notion of the Moebius strip and other paradoxes of topology, also suggesting by a remote flight of imagination the theme of Godel’s theorem that no mathematical system is completely determined or self-consistent. The artist’s works thus have the ability to nourish a whole series of speculations.

Let us look at the actual paintings. The surfaces acquire volume by a stepwise layering of acrylic to achieve a sort of supple mat. The painter accumulates up to twenty layers of acrylic paint and gels that “embalm” one newspaper sheet.  He paints on both surfaces of the resulting mat. The final surface – the one that is visible to us – is “coolly elegant” in most cases: painting with little aura , as well as quite referential as befits the pliable surfaces that hint at the decorative nature of textiles and at their utility… and yet, a careful look does reveal a discrete charm of the painting. (yes, there is some aura, nevertheless) We note references to marine landscapes peopled by somewhat undifferentiated characters via a kind of shorthand portraiture reduced to the unrecognizable that make us think of some of the iconic postures of the Italian transavangarde: evocations of Chia, Clemente, Cucchi glimmer softly…

And if we further consider recent art history, a kind of philosophical anthropology is suggested by these somewhat spectral shades: hints of Giacometti’s silhouettes, and closer to home (Montreal) hints of the archetypal anthropological characters in the painting and engraving of François Vincent and Pierre-Louis Bougie… A vision of man as a spectral trace, yet possessing a potential, a nucleus of psychological repersonalization, regeneration… This may create a connection with the Sartrian theme of an inescapable residual freedom, inalienable under any, under the most hostile of circumstances.

In the landscape backgrounds with their marine flavor, one sees notes of Turner and Nicholas de Staël, whose wistful, ever so dreamy, ever so subtle palette of blues has not been replicated since his suicide in the 1950’s. Here a family note may be allowed: on his father’s side the painter possesses “White Russian” roots, that is to say his grandfather was a member of the Russian aristocracy driven into exile at the threat of being executed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917. The paternal family has lived in the West for three generations, but some of the Russian ethos, some of the wistful, universalist, wry, fatalistic yet joyful and enthusiastic ethos is present in the painter’s discourse.

A one-time member of the French foreign legion before becoming the vital, the essential colorist, Nicolas de Staël also had Russian émigré aristocratic forbears, that makes Voeikoff-Erens feel some form of kinship with the great lyrical abstract painter. And speaking in a way that connects with de Staël’s horizons, as well as with his own somewhat more melancholy marine vistas, the artist remarks: “My perception of things is from a very solitary viewpoint. The horizon is vast… I am a free agent”.

On his mother’s side, Voeikoff-Erens is of Dutch ancestry. This perhaps explains a certain engineering dexterity, a form of cool matter-of-factness that additionally characterizes his otherwise dreamy approach. And therefore, it is not by mere coincidence that Mondrian-like color grids adorn both sides of one of his supple paintings which also happens to appear on his business card.

Accompanying his sculpture-paintings, Voeikoff-Erens has an interesting, original discourse that compares favorably with the wooden language (langue de bois) that ponderously weighs on most contemporary art.

“For me, the idea of art is such that self-expression is a treasure”, says the artist. “Society discourages it. The self is a reminder of what is not useful in society”, continues Voeikoff quoting the Slovenian philosopher Slavos Zizek. “Since the nineteenth century, the self has been constantly derided”. The creation of sculpture-paintings is a very private activity for the painter, a way to manifest the self. Voeikoff-Erens says that if he now exhibits more often, it is thanks to the encouragement of his family and of other admirers, who think it absolutely vital for his work to reach the public domain and to take part in the dialogue of art forms. His paradoxes address in an ironic or humorous way the issue of the role of the artwork, as well as many aspects related to the issue of what is esthetically undecidable.

As in the questions raised by the open-endedness of the appearance of his doubly-painted surfaces, the issue of the private and intimate nature of the process of painting considered from the artist’s viewpoint -on the one hand – and on the other hand, the very act of exhibiting his paintings, are inscribed in the form of an undecidable and reiterative dialectic of the act of reflection on the role of art.