There are today amazing discrepencies between the various political, social, economic and cultural systems that make up the world. These are mostly speed gaps which create faults, wirlpools, overlappings, leading to a temporal cleaving that splits the political universe into more or less mobile and more or les centrifugal wheelworks. The artist is inevitably under the influence of those gears, whether he suffers them or contrls them. Didn't Modern Art itself derive from a speed up process ? The simple means used by a Goya, which will fascinate Manet, also came from the necessity to go faster, in order to quickly make the tapestries commisioned by the King's factories. Not only does the artist invest space, but he also organizes time...  According to the form he gives it, from circular immobility to the tragic bursting of dripping, from the deep occultation of meaning to the immediacy of a mediatic image, the flow rate of time, which the artist learns to control his work , conditions and structures the way he sees the world.

Cristina Tiano and Thierry Cheverney, that's one of their common points, deliberately display the creakings, the ambiguities and the dysfunctions of the pictorial machinery, as an assemble of clashing, contradictory, heterogeous speeches. While manipulating the fields of knowledges, those different time lapses of enunciation and vision, Tiano and Cheverney try to point out this "secret royalty" of painting, the one Malraux saw in Cézanne's apples. Pointing it out, they choose to place thier work under the moral authority of Gasiorowski, while in france the latter has been kept carefully unknown, by the tenants of formalism. Thus they perpetuate a chain of indirect heritage in which Césanne chooses Poussin, Manet, Goya and Duchamp, Leonardo. So the udge shadow of Gasiorowski is invoked by each of these two young artists, and it is not by chance if he appears as the fragile tutelary of the emerging generations; the essential contribution made by the creator of "Stances" or "Suite Cézanienne", the imaginary confident of the Indian Kiga, still remains to be considered, three years after he died, in the international context. At any rate, the scope of this work leads him today to be the theorical base of many reflections about time, the creative individual, history, fiction or sacredness... I mean that Gasiorowski stands up like a metaphor of painting itself, bent as on the -Empedoclean- task to intermingle with it in a boundless workship, which could be translated into a quasi-christly-statement- "This is the body of Art. And the painting is my skin." Therefore it was natural that Cheverney and Tiano would recognize themselves in this adventure of exact and tragic identification with this pictorial body they judge necessary to dismember, one organ after the other, before coming to a double conclusion: first, that making of art is derisive if you take every part of it separately. But that, from the assemblage of all those representation scraps, from the pottering of those peels, Art draws its enigmatic grandeur. Gasiorowski, just like Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Bertrand or Boltanski, bear witness of this whisper so typical of a certain French art - let us call it the emphasis on essential derision. That is the tragi-comic unfolding of a representation characterized by a self-amused solemnity, by an oblique spirituality: a mysticism of the "nearto nothing". And this, which the poorest elements, a priori the most remote from those sovereign notions, aimed at evoking a maximum of invisible through a minimum of visible. Beauty (or intensity, emotion, whatever) being and idle promise, inaccessible to a pair of retinas.

What unites Tiano and Cheverney in their will to enunciate the terms of a universe of "essential derision" is that they understood the best way to display the essence of painting is to occult it. A playright, eager to increase the dramatic intensity of his play, will hide a corpse in a closet, or will postpone for ever Godot's arrival. The body of painting, the metaphysical concern, spirituality, are as many corpses in the closet of our hypercontemporaneity... Thier pungent smell, alternately acrid or heady, permeates the works of Tiano and Cheverney, who know that the chanson de geste they dream of can only be a shadow theater, and their painting opera, only a little song to deappeared gods. Melville wrote: "Truth often has jagged edges."

This re-allocation of painting is in keeping with Cristina Tiano's itinerary: born in Argentina, that she left at a very young age to go to France, her pictorial beginnings are branded by the memory of South American Baroque, while being disturbed by the Support-Surface imperatives, still prevailing in the late Seventies. Soon she tries to incorporate a refletion on the material throuh the baroque "mania for seeing", through the representation of an object (a spool, a tea-pot), which picture is blown up by a play of superimpositions, of magnifications, of trompe-l'oeil, trying to include the viewer in a laboratory experimentation. By endlessly repeating a simple pattern, she wants to show that when you see too much, you may end up seeing nothing, because you are sort of blinded. More = Less. Baroque = Minimal. Later, Tiano decides to alter the order of her investigations, and to acceed to nomination (naming); from then on, she will give up any apparent materiality, setting painting within a more complex system, slowly covered by its accessories, its wastes, its effects or its crutches. She makes that "Tribute to Gasiorowski" exhibited in Frankfurt, and develops and organic theory of painting. The latter, according to Gasiorowski, is an obscure divinity structured by a theology, which has its own martyr saints and its own iconoclastic detractors - Painting whith capital P. From this analogy, Cristina Tiano will build her glacial altars, the chappelles ardentes of painting, that seem to contain all the tretises peripheral to it, all its translations, yet without ever disclosing it. Everything in these fittings up of waxed panels, signs, fake frames, mirrors and containers, seems to designate an absent and idle God. Or rather, everything contributes to create an indraught, a vacuum necessary for his arrival. Duchamp talked about his "glass delays", Tiano could talk about her "waitings"... There is an ambiguous cousinship with Alan Mac Collum's "Surrogates", which placebo function, along with the will to be on the field of the industrial object, have caught Tiano's attention. We could also quote Ashley Bickerton, for his acid strategy of naming the constituent parts. But Tiano uses "simulationism" rather than dwelling on it, diverting her forms for the benefit of a thought that is foreign, or even opposed to it. When she puts some pigment in paint boxes and places them inside a portable altar looking like a liqueur cabinet, ("L'espace du rituel"), what is at stake is not to accept the dissolution of art in furniture, but to celebrate its capacity to resist it... When she names the gallery owner, the critic, the coexhibitor, it is not so much a cold statement but rather an amused appeal to their vanity... When she writes "Haute Peinture" on top of one of her works, would you know that it is the slogan of a french industrial paint company ? She presents art as an intelligence, in the axact meaning of the word, that infiltrates all its annexes, all the object parameters. We are far from an allegiance to mockery: in her work, Cristina Tiano establishes a dialogue between simulationism, which she defines as a thought of illusion and of negation of the body, that is the "Buddhist Maya's Veil", and the presence of matter, an "esprit de corps" of painting. And what is at stake, according to her, is to get out of this world of illusion to enter a higher unity, a necessary synthesis. This synthesis is materialized, in many of her works, by the red velvet hinting at Rembrandt. And it is a painting by Rembrandt, "The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Deijman", which could best exemplify the deconstruction undertaken by Cristina Tiano. This painting, indeed, deals with the dissection of a body, the onlooker, frontality, and a detached tragedy.  Tiano, as well as Cheverney, know their concerns are different from those of a philosopher, simply because the "painter brings his/her body", like Valery wrote. Yet if the former's work results from a series of conflicts withdrawal.

For Thierry Cheverney, painting is an exercise of removal. And his successive series are as many different "detachments", from the remote contemplation of oniric landscapes (his New-ORK Surrealist period), to the extreme altitude of the "laquers" with Stéphane Jaspert. His ideal  image of the artist would be that of a focal which would open and close endlessly, in an everlasting focusing. This notion of a being as a "pure outlook", besides, is the actuallization of a Zen koan: "Be a swinging door". The obsession of purity leads Cheverney to both Klein's and Gasiorowski ethics. The Blown up and contradictoryaspect of his cosmic vision explains his apparent versality, from the "laquers" to the "scappings": the latter, a camouflage of a disgusting pictorial matter under an amuminium layer torn by the painter's action, relates directly with this notion of purity, despite the appearances. First, because the painting is hidden under a food product package: Cheverney thus evokes the disappearing of art under its modalities for keeping and presentation. Secondly, because the gesture is highly ironical about the expressionist pantomine. Finally, the picture is framed by High Tech shelves, a hint to furniture. In other words, Cheverney exhibits and endeavours to transcend all interferences to perception, what he considers obstacles to the serenity of onlooking. In the same time, he tells a true tale of death through painting, with a series of sculptures: the "fossiles", paint tubes impaled on a bone... Malevitch's "black square", a puzzle... Cheverney, whatever he does, always paints still lives. The key to this universe might be the petrification, the "happiness of stones". Thus this 1979 photograph showing a statue he describes as "imposing", uncompromising, like oainting is"... Or else, even more significant, the material that makes up the "Aquarelles", this "laquer cream" coming out of the can like a thick jelly ... Cheverney's work is unceasingly seeking all the postures of immobility. The "Aquarelles" themselves consist in a putting together of uneven levels: plywood, torn cardboard, cardboard surface. These various levels are linked together only by the heavy stitches of the "laquer cream", quiet happiness. Contrary to the previous series, in which a perturbation (the line in the "laquers", the gesture in the scrappings") disturbed the quietness of painting, the latter now appears as a uniffying element, thus rising higher. This dialectics of violence and peacefulness is the main pole of Cheverney's work, a pole by which painting can magnetize all  speeches. The flexibility, the extreme openness of the system built by the artist, testifies both the influence of Far East thinking and that of Giani Vattimo's -a theorician of "weak thinking". For the latter, "the mobility of interpretation" is the only possibility given to the post-modern individual, who must place himself "under the subject's authority".

And if Thierry Cheverney can claim the "weak thinking", and Cristina Tiano a "thinking of matter", both assert by the intensity of the pictorial steles they offer to the viewer, that the ethical dimension of art is today the shortest way to metaphysics.

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