Certain Selves
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No one. Silence .... In a sort of clammy dream he heard a sound of cries ... He turned and looked at his companions. Squatting on their heels, with place faces and shining eyes, Clapot and Dandieu were watching. ... He gazed towards the south where all was empty. mathieu screwed up his eyes, but the road stretched by beneath him. The objects upon it were all running along, intermingled, dwindled.
Jean Paul Satre, iron in the soul. 1949.1
It was the season of defeat. Satre's little cluster of characters are hopelessly ranged against invading motorised infantry. All are apprehensive, some are gripped by fear and horror. They huddle together, but none has ever felt so much alone. They may prevail, but the odds are against them. They have never so keenly sensed their own mortality. Their environment offers little shelter and no solace. They wait. The moment of confrontation is imminent.
Satre's characters are Vivienne Dadour's. Her figures, like his, exist precariously in a world of silence, sudden cries, pale faces and shining eyes, emptiness, and intermingled objects. They often dwell in a penumbra of pessimism-a condition which runs like a persistent ache through much expressionism.
He tried, in vain, to make out their faces. Two slim figures, a pair of round, smooth heads without mouths.
Jean Paul Satre, iron in the sould.2
Dadour's figures are similarly smooth headed. Their naked skulls suggest vulnerability, and allow the characters to be read equally as male or female. Her figures are also without mouths. It is left to the eyes to convey the emotion that consumes them in their present crisis. Dadour is familiar, of course, with the work of other artists who use their subject's eyes to transmit sentiment: Joy Hester for example, and Swiss drawer Miriam Cahn, whose figures are engulfed by dark and baleful atmospheres, and fix the viewer with poignant and appealing eyes. With the exception of her recent painting Presence, where the figure considers its other self with fond bemusement, the eyes of Dadour's figures convey emotions that are bleaker than Hester's or Cahn's, and more compelling. Dadour has spoken of her figures possessing "the spirit to rise above uncertainty and to keep going", but they are often caught in moments of doubt, their eyes dull with weary resignation.
Colour is suppressed, the black, white and grey palette sometimes being extended by a brown/plum wash that is the colour of spilled blood, dried and hardened.
Dadour's line functions in its traditional role of describing boundaries and contours, mainly when catching the curve of a head or the arc of a shoulder blade. But more often it swings, buckles, loops and careers independently of form, as it traces energetic rhythms and movements, and records the brusque and passionate gestures of the artist's intoxicated hand.
Yet Dadour is not content to allow the work to remain merely a field of fluid, rhythmic calligraphy. To avoid this, she frequently employs deliberately disjunctive manoeuvres, such as a blanked out area to disrupt spatial continuity. Her use of collage plays a similar function. The collage plays a similar function. The collage elements derive from her abandoned art works, cut up and laid onto already painted surfaces. Previously completed lines may suddenly terminate when they reach the collage edge; tonal passages may abruptly bloom. Planes become skewed; spacial relationships become equivocal. This dislocation of space, jemmied out alignment by the collage edges, echoes the predicaments of her characters, engaged in their grim efforts to survive in a fragmented and misaligned society.
Dadour has read quite widely on expressionism, and she was interested in the view expressed by Donald E. Gordon that expressionist art simultaneously possessed two or more contradictory meanings.3 Her use of collage and over drawing, which extracts episodes, moods and fragments from one narrative and relocates them somewhat arbitrarily in another, constructs further layers of oblique meanings.
Ultimately, however, the art works of Vivienne Dadour (like the novels of Satre) are about the alienation of the individual, the mystery of being, and making sense of human pain.
Peter Pinson
1 Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972, pp.215-216
2 Op. cit. p214
3 Gordon, Donald E., "Content and Contradiction", Art and America. Dec. 1982, p.77.