Abstract Baroque
Kyoto - Kokedera
Under the title Abstract Baroque, Cyb, whom we know as a painter and who has always been known as a lover of writing, offers Area editions an abecedary that she entitles Abstract Baroque, which can at once appear as an oxymoron as much as a pleonasm, but it provokes a deflagration of the senses, from which thoughts then spring forth without measure elsewhere. She grasps herself in the profusion of her words. Let us conceive that art be cosa mentale and everything is said: mentale, there lies its abstract part… As for the cosa, who can doubt that painting, here an active presence of the mind, speaks to us.
The text of the book, by the dozen, offers its entries: the charm of improbability when essays in embryo rub shoulders – the elaboration of a thought on art – and intimate arrows, laden with perfumes from elsewhere, whose coruscating intensity leads us to the edges of childhood. The blades of the sun gorged Cyb's sensibility from the very origin, they produced the ferments of a reflection whose supports – music, literature and philosophy – constitute cardinal virtues, which her abecedary delivers in small touches. There remains painting. Would one guess it as the product of all this, or would it rather be its mechanics that orders this whole that she is. Her painting, uncompromising, is not made to please; from the first glance, it disturbs or seduces because it is nothing but the total approbation of what the artist is deep within herself. Eruption: Cyb does not paint with her back bent by what she knows or what seduces her, and her culture has no hold on her gesture, nor on her palette which charters only pure tones, through the magic of phosphenes. Rhythmic plays in monochrome harmonies and stridencies of tones set in contrasts. These works do not call for plastic tasting, but stimulate the gaze while leaving vision free. Her colors laid down with a busk-like touch, entangle curves, induce optical revolutions. Color here advocates for its own space and triumphs over the painting which becomes, notably in the latest works, a source of energy. A trial by the gaze of the whole body drowned in an elsewhere whose name I do not know, but which transports me into positive fields. Cyb's titles affixed to the painting, often a traveling evocation, are necessary only to her, and they in no way hinder the astonishing transport that her painting provides.
In her exhibition at the Select, the magic of the mirrors of the place – which for more than a century has welcomed the greatest – further multiplies the swirling of color, and there, one believes one understands what baroque suggests.