This is not an exercise!
The original images are in black and white, most often extracted from works printed during the Cold War. Encyclopedias, Aviation Stories, Time Life, Science and Life, militaria. Curiosities and revelations found today as if by miracle in the depths of internet and virtual. Aerodynamics, high altitude experiments, stratospheric balloons. Atomic tests, irradiated deserts, Roswell. Eternal fears despite the long-time dismantling of divine mechanics, a mystery slammed inside the two dimensions of the canvas. In a game of X-rays and limestone, a skeleton participates in a crash test, waiting for the accident, belted in his pilot seat.
In the middle of nowhere, a soldier juggles one hand, in this trompe l'oeil, with a suspended observatory, this mechanical planet. A man stands, tiny, at the entrance of a gigantic wind tunnel, contemplative at the edge of this aberration. In the cockpit of the painting, in this just blur of the speed stopped, two men get lost in the passage of the nudes. Games of glass beads, manipulations in reflections, old ergonomics. And this man who saw a UFO, lying to the signs of the afterlife forever etched in his flesh. And this camp seen diving, in this fog of dirty honey, this territory caramelized with memories.
Pierre Moulin reframes these apparitions, he dresses them in invented colors: stained ochres, olive greens, oil grey, acidic whites. Abstract beaches insist on the medium alone, in these fields, a few gestures buried like a mine tell us that it is indeed painting. With always this white, barely loaded with titanium or zinc, faithful to the nudity of flax, which comes to illuminate the subject in its withdrawals, its reserve. How to translate waves with a brush, oils, a little turpentine, serious space-time problems to solve, pure magic to represent. In a word the great game of painting since the Van Eyck brothers. Glacis after glacis, immersed in memory, an image appears, coming from the depths of the arts and ages, and always very current.
François Liénard
A brochure was published on the occasion of this exhibition: The pictorial space #3
