"What is most real for me are the illusions I create with my painting. The rest is quicksand." · Eugène Delacroix, Journal.
An encounter with Cyb, a fine figure of our contemporary painting who perpetuates in a style entirely her own (abstract baroque) the tradition of the Montparnasse painters. An accomplished artist, this lover of correspondences is also interested in philosophy and music.
Speaking of a painting is not an easy thing. We could even say it serves no purpose, except to furnish polite discussions at exhibition openings. Art is a bit like love; the more one talks about it, the less one does it. Unless one is an artist oneself, the exercise seems vain and one should probably stick to contemplation. Apply this Chinese precept: "If what you have to say is not more beautiful than silence, then be quiet."
Before beauty, silence imposes itself alone. That is why we were astonished to discover, in the aisles of the Sélect, a series of astonishing canvases, charming islets lost in the stream of noisy conversations, inevitably noisy. At the heart of the fascinating Montparnasse brasserie, a charming refuge for artists, from Modigliani to Cocteau by way of Rilke or Satie, these paintings symbolized continuity. The place continued, persevered — that is the right word — in its raison d'être. And thereby celebrated its centenary.
The Search for the Archaic
Since it is so vain to speak of works, let us try to approach the painter. Her name is Cyb. Almost like a nymph. Silver hair, impeccable elegance of fire slowly piercing ice. An intense presence, certainly, tinged with a hint of absence, of elsewhere. One never entirely pulls an artist out of her studio and one should always have scruples about forcing her to come into the world of conversations.
Her painting often bears witness to landscapes she loves. New Caledonia, Carthage, Venice, Stromboli. A painter of incandescence, she loves movements, eruptions. Her work borrows from certain ideals of philosophy; the search for the archaic is her principle. This word from the Greek evokes the founding, first, original act. The one from which all others flow. Childhood and its stigmata are not far away. Others would take the well-marked paths of psychoanalysis to approach it. She prefers to grip the cliffs — often steep — of painting.
In her Left Bank studio — which we shall not enter, wishing to preserve the mysteries — she shuts herself away for long stretches of silence, which often take on the character of a kind of trance, a sine qua non condition of creation. If one had to compare her to another painter, one would no doubt have to choose Kandinsky.
In Love with Armenia
"A painting is like an existence in shorthand, in concentrate. The completion of the painting is like its death: at last the whole takes on meaning. Such as into himself at last eternity changes him. The ensemble of elements makes sense," declares the artist.
And she continues: "The position of the painter is twofold — this is fascinating, instructive, astonishing. At once I am the existing being, who makes decisions, takes directions, chooses colors, without knowing in advance what their meaning will ultimately be. And yet with each decision I aim at a meaning, I have a precise intention: this small piece of yellow must clearly stand out from this red and this blue, without anything overflowing, without anything being blurred — this is vital. Painting unfolds in a succession of important details, of balance, of contrasts to be conquered, without my ever knowing what meaning, in the whole of the painting to come, this particular care I have given to this balance, to this contrast, will have."
Armenia is her secret garden, land of myths today shattered by a war that does not interest the media. She quotes Saint Augustine: "To sing is to pray twice." To paint is to repeat this mathematical operation once more, perhaps to multiply it. Need one even say it? She believes.
Heroine of abstract baroque, Cyb is interested in icons, touches upon the theme of adoration. "I often listen to Bach when I paint," she confides, without this surprising us. An artist who tames red and its metamorphoses so well, she would like, in the manner of a Chagall, to paint the ceiling of an opera house. We dream of it with her.