Cerj Lalonde is a post-contemporary nomad artist who has traveled the world, lived in China, the United States, and Canada.
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THE MULTIPLE GAZES
Amalia Caputo*
"Cerj Lalonde moves smoothly from the canvas to the camera, from computers to installations, producing and showcasing an extraordinarily rich and complex body of work created during the last 40 years. His purpose is to pursue a direct and, in each case, a different communication with the spectator.
It can be said that Lalonde works as a team with himself, not only to develop his artwork, but also to research and sharpen his personal ideas about contemporary culture. Lalonde is putting a fair amount of time, energy, and thought into his new media and technology productive structure, where he can directly address his issues, including those regarding the art world.
His paintings, installations, photographs, video, and web pages are intended to function each in its own ways as an overt revision and critique of the contemporary art system, as they establish parallel dialogues between the artist, the public, and the curatorial values.
Cerj Lalonde, the painter
Cerj Lalonde works his painting with a conceptual approach, as an attempt to restate the validity of painting as a practice per se. His abstract language ranges from lyric abstractionist pieces to many personal interpretations of art history masterpieces, as specific reflections upon geometric abstract paintings like Malevich´s black square series, or Albers' study of color, among others.
Lalonde holds many layers as an artist. His years of experience as a painter and thirst for art history and critique have helped him develop into a consciously literate artist. Formally, his domain of techniques ranges from drawing, printing, and primarily acrylic painting by means of a wildly contrasting palette. But more than any type of formalism, Lalonde´s work is a strong statement about painting itself and how he approaches abstraction from a conceptual viewpoint. His paintings celebrate the power and meaning of color and texture, the imperative voice of contrast and stridence, and the millions of possible solutions for a white canvas. I also see in his artwork a psychoanalytical interpretation of art, and a curiously unintentional approach to oriental philosophy appears throughout his multi-sized body of work.
In many of his canvases, the presence of the square has been integrated as an element of equilibrium and unity to the soul of the artwork itself. Lalonde is specifically interested in the qualities of painting as a medium: “What Painting and only Painting can do”. Of all arts, painting is perhaps the most intimate and personal of art languages. It reaches the viewer at the last phase, in the gallery, museum, or exhibition space.
In the meanwhile, there is a time frame between the moment when the artist finishes his work and it gets shown. This space of time is silence. It can be said that the gap between the act of painting and its way out of the studio has had Lalonde wondering about other strategies of approaching the viewer, the critic, and challenging the art world as a system.
New media and technology
In his body of work related to the Internet, the use of language can be established as the first notable addition, where the silent scream that comes from his paintings invades the screen and transforms it into words. We can feel the imperative urge to communicate. Lalonde addresses everyone and no one, and a certain/uncertain dialogue is established between him and the anonymous viewer/Web surfer/browser who reads it.
Lalonde has produced multiple websites. With this medium, he has taken over a physical/nonphysical space to express his ideas about the act of seeing, of looking, and getting intoxicated by the gaze, the sight, by the cognitive look, and the subjective one. Another interesting aspect is the inclusion of his images as an artist in several ways. For example, in SELF PORTRAIT AS A FAMOUS ARTIST, he presents himself in all the archetypical attire of the romanticized representation of the artist. Lalonde has reverted all his irony and sarcasm into images that appear as brushstrokes on his websites. Another image that frequently appears is the sweet face of a very young woman, who looks at the browser with sweetness and nostalgia. As websites are built through layers, Lalonde has also constructed layers of impact, thought, and reflection, by means of the multiplicity of images that appear, ranging from his own paintings, installations, portraits, and text.
He is interested in what defines art, who validates artwork, and how artists’ success has a strong pull to media and critic dependency. Lalonde points out these issues as loud as a silent scream. Titles of photographs such as Dominance of Curatorial Ideology, Global Mono-Cultural Art Discourse, or Hegemony of the Global Curatorial Class are samples of titles that frame parts of his Web political visual discourse.
In his installations and performances such as THE NO SHOW, and WORKING TO BECOME RICH AND FAMOUS SO YOU CAN LOVE ME FOREVER, Lalonde discusses the notion of the self and identity, the artist as a social figure, and the severe critique of the contemporary art system, and society at large. He questions the validity and the ideology of the curatorial establishment, the marketing methods, and the issues of the self – as he queries the conventional paradigm of the artist.
On his Web pages, Lalonde metamorphoses from an anonymous painter in his studio to a more public persona. His gaze looks at the viewer; his open mouth screams and questions the browser constantly, sometimes as an outsider and sometimes from the hypothetical voice of the viewer’s conscience.
In SEEING, a photographic installation that can be considered a milestone in his work, he presents a dark room that has many different-sized eyes that are looking at the viewer. An interesting aspect of Lalonde’s digital work is the presence of a perpetual reflection that not only shows the act of seeing itself, but in a more profound way, it presents the subconscious mind of the viewer. He inverts his role as an artist and establishes a dialogue with the unconscious of the spectator, both through his installations and digital artwork. He talks directly from the anonymity of the Internet to the subconscious of the viewer with phrases like HI!, WHERE ARE YOU? Or I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW YOU. Lalonde suggests a dialogue of affection and proximity with the anonymous viewer. He cries out for attention, asks questions, and asks for small reflections to be answered silently by the person who is on the other side of the computer, establishing a metaphor for the notion of the multiplicity of the self. But above all, the artist states that communication as art is always subjective.
Last but not least, we should briefly acknowledge Lalonde´s work in public places, within the streets of Miami’s main art areas, mainly the Wynwood and Design Districts. Lalonde has taken over the front of galleries, sidewalks, and walls with the graffiti://eye_luv_you:)), related to his multimedia installation titled SEVEN PROPOSITIONS FOR A NEW LOVE.
These street interventions are a courageous attempt to blast pedestrians’ consciousness to an impermanent moment of reflection. By this strategy, he is inserting human condition to human creation, relating in a logical discourse; human beings make art, human beings see art, therefore, art sees us, and art is human. Why does he do it? Who is it addressed to? The probable answer is to all of us and to himself. Cerj Lalonde has decidedly captured a huge space of silence that historically has isolated the artist from the spectator of the artwork. As silent as painting itself can be, it is as loud as his digital work and public space interventions are.
It would not be fair to separate all these different facets as an artist, as if we were speaking of different persons. Lalonde´s whole body of work is connected through formal elements that appear in any media he uses. The square, for example, is an important image, as well as the silhouetted eye that appears in paintings, installations, graphics, and throughout his Web pages. Lalonde formally uses certain elements to create a personal, specific language that conveys additional meaning to every art piece he develops.
The artist is interested in the notion of the spectator, in conveying messages to the unconscious in a psychoanalytical way, whether it is in painting or in the direct phrases he lets go by browsing through his web pages. Does he expect answers from us? Is he angry? Is he talking to us? Is he looking at me? Is he really talking to me? Can he see me? These are questions that arise once we know about his work.
As stated before, Lalonde points out the silence, the introspection. Furthermore, his work comprises a wide variety of forms and media and has articulated a strong and powerful aesthetic research on the many issues of art itself, its appreciation, circulation, diffusion, and agendas as well as the paradoxical non-communication that exists nowadays, not only in the art world but also in the society at large."
*Amalia Caputo, is a curator and contributor to the publications Extracamara Magazine, Caracas, and Arte Al Dia International, Miami. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Art History from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where she graduated with honors in 1988. In 1995, she received a Master of Arts in Photography from New York University and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Caracas, Barcelona, Mexico City, New York, and Miami. She lives and works in Miami, Florida.
https://cerjlalonde.com/
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ART AS PHILOSOPHY, PAINTING AS MIRROR
Antonina Zaru*.
"Where Id was, there I must be."
Sigmund Freud
In addition of being a diligent experimenter that applies a complex assortment of mediums (photography, video, installation, digital work), Cerj Lalonde remains above all an extraordinary painter. In evidence, one can view his splendid multimedia presentations of the nineteen-eighties that persistently summons the primitivism-alchemy of a Beuys as much as the “black hole” of electronic images by Nam June Paik. With a sharp insertion in the pages of the influential Canadian newspaper, Le Devoir, isn’t’ it Lalonde who protests the incompetence of the mass media in presenting and evaluating paintings, to the full advantage of the “sensational” art? Isn’t he the one that insists that the fundamental role of research on actual painting, according to his beliefs, is “unique and essential for the development of the human and of his existence in this world”? (Beuys used to say that life, even at a physiological level, was impossible without art).
It is during this interval when the fundamental centrality of philosophical language in Lalonde’s work was made clear. One of the first systematic analyses of the body of his artistic work in the light of a strong speculative system is owed to Joan Altabe, critic of the Herald Tribune who sensed correctly that the artistic language of Lalonde consists so often in the indispensability of fine lines, but that his canvases compel above all a “contemplative” glimpse across a certain mystical space that recalls Rothko and Newman.
Even from his first experiments in the field of visual arts, Cerj Lalonde’s indebtedness to such artists as Frank Stella, Mondrian, and Kandinsky appeared evident. Characteristics such as geometric backgrounds and lean use o f colorant, from strong conceptual connotations at the service of canvases whose urgency does not come across as an apparent alien. In connection with his work is it just a coincidence that the same Lalonde has revealed his artistry in these words?: “Some of my paintings are very structured and orderly, so that the security and the power of limitspermit total freedom for the expression of forms and colors and of all what painting and only painting can do.”
More than anyone else, it was the critic Leo Rosshandler who, several years ago, identified in the research of Cerj Lalonde a coherent philosophical system that, precisely for this artist convention, demands of the spectator concentration of a speculative kind. This smacks of superior art, lacking any artifice of intellectual closure but simply traverses canvases of splendid formal construction and of exquisite and delicate coloration. At the same time, Rosshandler also linked his research to that tradition extending from the Russian avant-garde until the post-modern era, assigning the work of Lalonde an autonomous role where abstraction becomes a bond between the deep glance of psychology and a general cast that combines intimacy and mysticism. An irremediable dichotomy? Not at all. First of all because glue (and guaranty) of a non-contradictory text in Lalonde is not simply the work, but the aesthetic experience and ethic that the work of art provides. The challenge is always that of inducing a “cognitive process” in which the onlookers and the artists with their respective philosophies have equal roles. Lalonde’s intellectual orientation rests upon a constant dialectic: classical method and post-modern asystematic, i.e., warmth of painting and chill of the new media, epistemology and feeling; but there is always this central theme: the obsession for “seeing” as discerner of judgment.
But the thing in itself which lies behind that which we see is not hidden; the “glimpse” is just one of the paradoxes which the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan has become attached to. This brings to mind Merleau-Ponty’s numerous writings on painting, among which one recalls Cezanne’s Doubt. “The rapport between the glimpse and that which one wishes to see is deceptive”, according to Lacan. But the glimpse is precisely that “social process” that unites across language all the observers in the symbolic sphere. The frustrated glimpse, if it is that which one wants “to see” is always the unachievable “other desire”. Yet, doesn’t Lacan, in Seminario XI discuss Le Visible et l’Invisible by Merleau-Ponty and define the glimpse as “the reversal of the portrayal”? And, as for his style? The mirror. (In front of Lalonde’s paintings, I often have the sensation of confronting the mysterious wardens of the mirrors: smooth surface, epicentricity of a bidimensional plan, the monochromatic…etc.)
It is Gilles Deleuze who speaks of “style” as the fundamental requirement for the philosophical. Isn’t art itself also style? Therefore, as Lalonde knows so well, the indispensable requirement of art is philosophy.
TO SEE OR TO BE SEEN
The art of Cerj Lalonde minimizes his apparent debt to the conceptual and spatial practices of the century just terminated. It is an extraordinary body of works that embraces Barnet Newman through Frank Stella and neo-conceptual experiments. (Above all, I think of Barnet Newman’s Achiles of 1952, or more programmatically The Name of 1949 – both at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; which with ink and course brush strokes announced the inextinguishable coexistence of the painter’s body and gesture with the philosophical approach providing ample tolerances, as others have demonstrated, as well as evidence of the absence of “deictic indicators” in Western painting as proposed by the philosopher Norman Bryson). However, it is Kasimir Malevitch and that fundamental oil of dimensional mediums that is Four black and four red of 1915, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that represents the rock base of the imagery of Lalonde. Much earlier Kadinsky emancipated his work from a sense of inferiority with musical analogies (i.e., “Improvisation”, “Compositions” …these are names of his works in the nineteen-tens); it was actually Malevitch who claimed an ontological matrix virtually across the linguistic orientation of the picture (and in the title of the work, the coincidence between “words” and content is defensibly pragmatic).
In the history of Western painting, one of the more important linguistic events has been, without a doubt, the invention of perspective. “Perspective is the conscious awareness of the eternity of time and of the infinity of space”, Cerj Lalonde has recently written. The classical perspective, far from offering an “exact solution”, is only one of the modes that humanity has invented to project the perceived world in front of itself and not a copy of that world, according to Merleau-Ponty. A fallacious concept – if the intent is the coincidence between representation and represented, but anyway a method, which serves as a grid through which one reads the world. That is because the discovery “of eternity and infinity” is actually within the limit of what is represented.
From this viewpoint, and renouncing the temptations for “mimicry”, what is the role of the artist? That of presenting simply the limits of the world and of men? Can his role be anything other than the priest of the finite?
“Talking about the identity of the artist is playing with a myth”, affirms Lalonde. He was referring to Freud’s comments in his preface to The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) when he asserts, “the problem of the artist cannot be analyzed”. In this perspective, one does not escape from awareness of a return to certain idealistic bunkers. Recalling how Barnett Newman said that “the first man was an artist”, it follows that for Lalonde identity is mainly a mater of personality (with all its complex characteristics); it is more than an ontological definition across the paradisiacal and romantic reinstatement of the creator/artist “hybrid”- enter the critic (the theoretical delimiter) of art as profession in the advanced industrial society.
In Lalonde, the divide between artist and spectator is melded in a perspective of “participation” in the aesthetic event, not just as a dynamic exchange (on such reciprocity, the artist lays out, as per Lacan, a great part of his work), but as an essential common background. As a conceptual illustration, this common background in the Renaissance painting was the convention of perspective.
Around the corner, there is also Maciunas and the resumption of the avant-garde of ’58 and later, when Lalonde remembers how Marilyn Ferguson said: “every being is an artist”. But that is also an elucidation. The perspective of Cerj is never that of revolt or of babbling Fluxus, but that of philosophical analysis. His art veers toward cosmogony (the aesthetic as theory of style) and could even falter if it reflects the Freudian assertion of the “non-analyzability” of creation (a process that renders futile the antique and therapeutic precept of “Know thyself!” which also is one justification for making art): but frustration will produce neither neuroses (in the sense of a non-shared language) nor a nihilistic gesture.
In short, art is the YES of all, but the Everyman of Lalonde (like the “being” of the citation by Ferguson who stands out on the horizon as a unique destiny of infinite finiteness), – it is the “philosophical man” in which nothing is more distant than ambiguous “Art is easy” by a Giuseppe Chiari. For Lalonde, if art is a pleasure, it is also a struggle because it is a process between opposites. Above all, it is the “process of knowing”.
And when Lalonde reveals that the picture appears to him like an evangelical “good tidings”, he becomes further empowered by the Gnostic inspiration (if non-mystical) of his research. And, above all, he uncovers an experiential facet of painting that for years gave “testimony” to the essentiality of the “verb”, which in Lalonde’s case is color and form.
Finite form is often represented by primary colors since the only path to salvation is always the grid of the archetype. And of science.
Even in the speculative phase, Lalonde has frequently revealed the fascination that people display toward Piero della Francesca and the painting of the Renaissance, but we have said it is the abstraction of the perspective in which the abstraction serves mainly to enliven it. In the classical painting, the rules of perspective (choice of objectification concerning the theory of subjectivity of the Gestalt) would put into the scene an image that alludes to movement. In Lalonde, it is not so much the gesture of the painting being revealed (in this he is closer to Mondrian than to Pollock), but the “gesture of intelligence” as rapport between the artist and the represented that has emanated from his power to represent.
Across these elements that the artist calls `scenario”, where is the space in which the work in front of a progressive experience and collective entity? That on which the artist works is an “infinite perspective” in which the installation in scene – emphasizing – across an experiential Zen matrix, the eternity of time and the infinity of space. This construction furnishes “pretexts” and “contexts” more than true and proper texts. His is a nimble art, made more by silence than by presence.
With regard to the oriental painting, Ales Erjavec, citing Francois Cheng, noted about the emptiness inside a picture, “it is not an inert presence, but it is exchanging breaths that unite the visible world (the painted space) with that invisible one”.
It is noted that Lalonde is a multimedia artist, but more in the camp of the painter (It is funny that passage of his in which the definition of his work, on the pattern of some sensationalistic prose used in contemporary criticism makes him “neo-abstract and contemporary, post-modern or actual, post-neo-constructivist or organic-neo-structuralist (…), to summarize, simply painting”…) do not indicate a middle ground for his preferences, but a precise philosophical sphere, whose mission is that of “communicating a vision” as one recites one of his vast series of works. The word “vision” is semantically rich (in French as in English) and refers either to mechanical processes of the eye and of the processes of the brain, or of the apparition beyond this world. The vision as “object” of relation of the Gestalt, but also as an actor in the event. In Lalonde, the solution may be in this doubt: what if the artistic vision was the true “subject”?
It is not quite the case that one of the more conceptual and programmatic works by Lalonde is the photographic installation “Seeing” (or “Criticism of the Judgment”) in which a room completely painted black accommodates a myriad of eyes on the walls, peering at us like eavesdropping monitors. What is its meaning? If art is always observed, we never need to forget that true art is born from action tied to the spectator and to the work itself. And at the moment, Lalonde presents us exactly with a complex work that is watched like this, but which, above all, from a Lacanian viewpoint, “watches us”.
This conceptual photographic installation (“Seeing”) exhibited in one of the rooms of the Museum of the Castello di Lupinari, has been fully studied in a series of meetings arranged by Professor Suzanne Leclair at Concordia University of Montreal. She promptly placed into context the interaction, in Lalonde, between space and representation, actually finding in the dialectic between emptiness and fullness, light and dark, to see and being seen, the most profound reasoning of his artistic communication.
Still, observing the works of Lalonde the question arises: who really communicates the Vision? The artist? The spectator? Or the work itself?
And one of the fundamental Gordian knots of the theory of contemporary art, which has been amply dealt with by Freud as well as Jacques Lacan and, before him, Merleau-Ponty,- is the vision as occupying an ontological centrum. This conception is not consistent with that of Heidegger, for whom poetry is the language of being. But the “logic of the glimpse”, perceived by Bryson, is that which “sees the representation” not like a mimicry attempt, but in "relation to its internal truth” (Erjavec). It is again Erjavec who remembers it, like Merleau-Ponty indicates: in the painting as the principal route for achieving “Existence”. But philosophy is aspiration to existence; so is awareness of one’s own limit.
Can hunger for perfection be overcome by love of perfection? Would we find ourselves speechless before the exquisite paintings of Piero della Francesca, and would we be able to share our empathy toward this moment of astonishment with others? Do we have the capacity to come to terms with such human emotions? Perhaps we don’t know the answer and are incapable of communicating our senses to others because we are not poets. Then how can we account for that species of dreamer that persists in being astonished by the nimble poetic labor that produces such perfection? Isn’t the total consciousness and unrelenting tension of one who commits to perfection, the being responsible for creating such perfection? If that is so, one such gifted dreamer whose life has been dedicated to that captivating glimpse of the truth through striving for perfection in the creative process is Cerj Lalonde.
In the final analysis, it is from here, from the perspective of the dizzying edge of the limit of man and of his irrepressible drive toward transcendence, that the abstract painting of Cerj Lalonde watches the world from inside himself. In this manner, he becomes the watch warden inside us all.
* Antonina Zaru
Antonina Zaru is an Italian curator and art critic who has organized several exhibitions and retrospectives (from Miro and Magritte to Richard Serra and Nam June Paik) in Museums around the world (New York, Washington, Tokyo, Basel, Austria, Spain, Korea, Rome, Milan, Venice). For many years, she organized the major exhibitions of Nam June Paik (Kunsthalle at Basel, Kunsthaus at Zurick, Statdrische Kunsthalle at Dusseldorf, Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna, Symposium international in Korea, Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Roma, German Pavillon at the Venice Biennale). She is a regulator contributor on art for several art journals and catalogues.
www.CerjLalonde.com
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THE MULTIPLE GAZES
Amalia Caputo*
"Cerj Lalonde moves smoothly from the canvas to the camera, from computers to installations, producing and showcasing an extraordinarily rich and complex body of work created during the last 40 years. His purpose is to pursue a direct and, in each case, a different communication with the spectator.
It can be said that Lalonde works as a team with himself, not only to develop his artwork, but also to research and sharpen his personal ideas about contemporary culture. Lalonde is putting a fair amount of time, energy, and thought into his new media and technology productive structure, where he can directly address his issues, including those regarding the art world.
His paintings, installations, photographs, video, and web pages are intended to function each in its own ways as an overt revision and critique of the contemporary art system, as they establish parallel dialogues between the artist, the public, and the curatorial values.
Cerj Lalonde, the painter
Cerj Lalonde works his painting with a conceptual approach, as an attempt to restate the validity of painting as a practice per se. His abstract language ranges from lyric abstractionist pieces to many personal interpretations of art history masterpieces, as specific reflections upon geometric abstract paintings like Malevich´s black square series, or Albers' study of color, among others.
Lalonde holds many layers as an artist. His years of experience as a painter and thirst for art history and critique have helped him develop into a consciously literate artist. Formally, his domain of techniques ranges from drawing, printing, and primarily acrylic painting by means of a wildly contrasting palette. But more than any type of formalism, Lalonde´s work is a strong statement about painting itself and how he approaches abstraction from a conceptual viewpoint. His paintings celebrate the power and meaning of color and texture, the imperative voice of contrast and stridence, and the millions of possible solutions for a white canvas. I also see in his artwork a psychoanalytical interpretation of art, and a curiously unintentional approach to oriental philosophy appears throughout his multi-sized body of work.
In many of his canvases, the presence of the square has been integrated as an element of equilibrium and unity to the soul of the artwork itself. Lalonde is specifically interested in the qualities of painting as a medium: “What Painting and only Painting can do”. Of all arts, painting is perhaps the most intimate and personal of art languages. It reaches the viewer at the last phase, in the gallery, museum, or exhibition space.
In the meanwhile, there is a time frame between the moment when the artist finishes his work and it gets shown. This space of time is silence. It can be said that the gap between the act of painting and its way out of the studio has had Lalonde wondering about other strategies of approaching the viewer, the critic, and challenging the art world as a system.
New media and technology
In his body of work related to the Internet, the use of language can be established as the first notable addition, where the silent scream that comes from his paintings invades the screen and transforms it into words. We can feel the imperative urge to communicate. Lalonde addresses everyone and no one, and a certain/uncertain dialogue is established between him and the anonymous viewer/Web surfer/browser who reads it.
Lalonde has produced multiple websites. With this medium, he has taken over a physical/nonphysical space to express his ideas about the act of seeing, of looking, and getting intoxicated by the gaze, the sight, by the cognitive look, and the subjective one. Another interesting aspect is the inclusion of his images as an artist in several ways. For example, in SELF PORTRAIT AS A FAMOUS ARTIST, he presents himself in all the archetypical attire of the romanticized representation of the artist. Lalonde has reverted all his irony and sarcasm into images that appear as brushstrokes on his websites. Another image that frequently appears is the sweet face of a very young woman, who looks at the browser with sweetness and nostalgia. As websites are built through layers, Lalonde has also constructed layers of impact, thought, and reflection, by means of the multiplicity of images that appear, ranging from his own paintings, installations, portraits, and text.
He is interested in what defines art, who validates artwork, and how artists’ success has a strong pull to media and critic dependency. Lalonde points out these issues as loud as a silent scream. Titles of photographs such as Dominance of Curatorial Ideology, Global Mono-Cultural Art Discourse, or Hegemony of the Global Curatorial Class are samples of titles that frame parts of his Web political visual discourse.
In his installations and performances such as THE NO SHOW, and WORKING TO BECOME RICH AND FAMOUS SO YOU CAN LOVE ME FOREVER, Lalonde discusses the notion of the self and identity, the artist as a social figure, and the severe critique of the contemporary art system, and society at large. He questions the validity and the ideology of the curatorial establishment, the marketing methods, and the issues of the self – as he queries the conventional paradigm of the artist.
On his Web pages, Lalonde metamorphoses from an anonymous painter in his studio to a more public persona. His gaze looks at the viewer; his open mouth screams and questions the browser constantly, sometimes as an outsider and sometimes from the hypothetical voice of the viewer’s conscience.
In SEEING, a photographic installation that can be considered a milestone in his work, he presents a dark room that has many different-sized eyes that are looking at the viewer. An interesting aspect of Lalonde’s digital work is the presence of a perpetual reflection that not only shows the act of seeing itself, but in a more profound way, it presents the subconscious mind of the viewer. He inverts his role as an artist and establishes a dialogue with the unconscious of the spectator, both through his installations and digital artwork. He talks directly from the anonymity of the Internet to the subconscious of the viewer with phrases like HI!, WHERE ARE YOU? Or I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW YOU. Lalonde suggests a dialogue of affection and proximity with the anonymous viewer. He cries out for attention, asks questions, and asks for small reflections to be answered silently by the person who is on the other side of the computer, establishing a metaphor for the notion of the multiplicity of the self. But above all, the artist states that communication as art is always subjective.
Last but not least, we should briefly acknowledge Lalonde´s work in public places, within the streets of Miami’s main art areas, mainly the Wynwood and Design Districts. Lalonde has taken over the front of galleries, sidewalks, and walls with the graffiti://eye_luv_you:)), related to his multimedia installation titled SEVEN PROPOSITIONS FOR A NEW LOVE.
These street interventions are a courageous attempt to blast pedestrians’ consciousness to an impermanent moment of reflection. By this strategy, he is inserting human condition to human creation, relating in a logical discourse; human beings make art, human beings see art, therefore, art sees us, and art is human. Why does he do it? Who is it addressed to? The probable answer is to all of us and to himself. Cerj Lalonde has decidedly captured a huge space of silence that historically has isolated the artist from the spectator of the artwork. As silent as painting itself can be, it is as loud as his digital work and public space interventions are.
It would not be fair to separate all these different facets as an artist, as if we were speaking of different persons. Lalonde´s whole body of work is connected through formal elements that appear in any media he uses. The square, for example, is an important image, as well as the silhouetted eye that appears in paintings, installations, graphics, and throughout his Web pages. Lalonde formally uses certain elements to create a personal, specific language that conveys additional meaning to every art piece he develops.
The artist is interested in the notion of the spectator, in conveying messages to the unconscious in a psychoanalytical way, whether it is in painting or in the direct phrases he lets go by browsing through his web pages. Does he expect answers from us? Is he angry? Is he talking to us? Is he looking at me? Is he really talking to me? Can he see me? These are questions that arise once we know about his work.
As stated before, Lalonde points out the silence, the introspection. Furthermore, his work comprises a wide variety of forms and media and has articulated a strong and powerful aesthetic research on the many issues of art itself, its appreciation, circulation, diffusion, and agendas as well as the paradoxical non-communication that exists nowadays, not only in the art world but also in the society at large."
*Amalia Caputo, is a curator and contributor to the publications Extracamara Magazine, Caracas, and Arte Al Dia International, Miami. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Art History from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where she graduated with honors in 1988. In 1995, she received a Master of Arts in Photography from New York University and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Caracas, Barcelona, Mexico City, New York, and Miami. She lives and works in Miami, Florida.
https://cerjlalonde.com/
_______________________________________________________
ART AS PHILOSOPHY, PAINTING AS MIRROR
Antonina Zaru*.
"Where Id was, there I must be."
Sigmund Freud
In addition of being a diligent experimenter that applies a complex assortment of mediums (photography, video, installation, digital work), Cerj Lalonde remains above all an extraordinary painter. In evidence, one can view his splendid multimedia presentations of the nineteen-eighties that persistently summons the primitivism-alchemy of a Beuys as much as the “black hole” of electronic images by Nam June Paik. With a sharp insertion in the pages of the influential Canadian newspaper, Le Devoir, isn’t’ it Lalonde who protests the incompetence of the mass media in presenting and evaluating paintings, to the full advantage of the “sensational” art? Isn’t he the one that insists that the fundamental role of research on actual painting, according to his beliefs, is “unique and essential for the development of the human and of his existence in this world”? (Beuys used to say that life, even at a physiological level, was impossible without art).
It is during this interval when the fundamental centrality of philosophical language in Lalonde’s work was made clear. One of the first systematic analyses of the body of his artistic work in the light of a strong speculative system is owed to Joan Altabe, critic of the Herald Tribune who sensed correctly that the artistic language of Lalonde consists so often in the indispensability of fine lines, but that his canvases compel above all a “contemplative” glimpse across a certain mystical space that recalls Rothko and Newman.
Even from his first experiments in the field of visual arts, Cerj Lalonde’s indebtedness to such artists as Frank Stella, Mondrian, and Kandinsky appeared evident. Characteristics such as geometric backgrounds and lean use o f colorant, from strong conceptual connotations at the service of canvases whose urgency does not come across as an apparent alien. In connection with his work is it just a coincidence that the same Lalonde has revealed his artistry in these words?: “Some of my paintings are very structured and orderly, so that the security and the power of limitspermit total freedom for the expression of forms and colors and of all what painting and only painting can do.”
More than anyone else, it was the critic Leo Rosshandler who, several years ago, identified in the research of Cerj Lalonde a coherent philosophical system that, precisely for this artist convention, demands of the spectator concentration of a speculative kind. This smacks of superior art, lacking any artifice of intellectual closure but simply traverses canvases of splendid formal construction and of exquisite and delicate coloration. At the same time, Rosshandler also linked his research to that tradition extending from the Russian avant-garde until the post-modern era, assigning the work of Lalonde an autonomous role where abstraction becomes a bond between the deep glance of psychology and a general cast that combines intimacy and mysticism. An irremediable dichotomy? Not at all. First of all because glue (and guaranty) of a non-contradictory text in Lalonde is not simply the work, but the aesthetic experience and ethic that the work of art provides. The challenge is always that of inducing a “cognitive process” in which the onlookers and the artists with their respective philosophies have equal roles. Lalonde’s intellectual orientation rests upon a constant dialectic: classical method and post-modern asystematic, i.e., warmth of painting and chill of the new media, epistemology and feeling; but there is always this central theme: the obsession for “seeing” as discerner of judgment.
But the thing in itself which lies behind that which we see is not hidden; the “glimpse” is just one of the paradoxes which the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan has become attached to. This brings to mind Merleau-Ponty’s numerous writings on painting, among which one recalls Cezanne’s Doubt. “The rapport between the glimpse and that which one wishes to see is deceptive”, according to Lacan. But the glimpse is precisely that “social process” that unites across language all the observers in the symbolic sphere. The frustrated glimpse, if it is that which one wants “to see” is always the unachievable “other desire”. Yet, doesn’t Lacan, in Seminario XI discuss Le Visible et l’Invisible by Merleau-Ponty and define the glimpse as “the reversal of the portrayal”? And, as for his style? The mirror. (In front of Lalonde’s paintings, I often have the sensation of confronting the mysterious wardens of the mirrors: smooth surface, epicentricity of a bidimensional plan, the monochromatic…etc.)
It is Gilles Deleuze who speaks of “style” as the fundamental requirement for the philosophical. Isn’t art itself also style? Therefore, as Lalonde knows so well, the indispensable requirement of art is philosophy.
TO SEE OR TO BE SEEN
The art of Cerj Lalonde minimizes his apparent debt to the conceptual and spatial practices of the century just terminated. It is an extraordinary body of works that embraces Barnet Newman through Frank Stella and neo-conceptual experiments. (Above all, I think of Barnet Newman’s Achiles of 1952, or more programmatically The Name of 1949 – both at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; which with ink and course brush strokes announced the inextinguishable coexistence of the painter’s body and gesture with the philosophical approach providing ample tolerances, as others have demonstrated, as well as evidence of the absence of “deictic indicators” in Western painting as proposed by the philosopher Norman Bryson). However, it is Kasimir Malevitch and that fundamental oil of dimensional mediums that is Four black and four red of 1915, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that represents the rock base of the imagery of Lalonde. Much earlier Kadinsky emancipated his work from a sense of inferiority with musical analogies (i.e., “Improvisation”, “Compositions” …these are names of his works in the nineteen-tens); it was actually Malevitch who claimed an ontological matrix virtually across the linguistic orientation of the picture (and in the title of the work, the coincidence between “words” and content is defensibly pragmatic).
In the history of Western painting, one of the more important linguistic events has been, without a doubt, the invention of perspective. “Perspective is the conscious awareness of the eternity of time and of the infinity of space”, Cerj Lalonde has recently written. The classical perspective, far from offering an “exact solution”, is only one of the modes that humanity has invented to project the perceived world in front of itself and not a copy of that world, according to Merleau-Ponty. A fallacious concept – if the intent is the coincidence between representation and represented, but anyway a method, which serves as a grid through which one reads the world. That is because the discovery “of eternity and infinity” is actually within the limit of what is represented.
From this viewpoint, and renouncing the temptations for “mimicry”, what is the role of the artist? That of presenting simply the limits of the world and of men? Can his role be anything other than the priest of the finite?
“Talking about the identity of the artist is playing with a myth”, affirms Lalonde. He was referring to Freud’s comments in his preface to The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) when he asserts, “the problem of the artist cannot be analyzed”. In this perspective, one does not escape from awareness of a return to certain idealistic bunkers. Recalling how Barnett Newman said that “the first man was an artist”, it follows that for Lalonde identity is mainly a mater of personality (with all its complex characteristics); it is more than an ontological definition across the paradisiacal and romantic reinstatement of the creator/artist “hybrid”- enter the critic (the theoretical delimiter) of art as profession in the advanced industrial society.
In Lalonde, the divide between artist and spectator is melded in a perspective of “participation” in the aesthetic event, not just as a dynamic exchange (on such reciprocity, the artist lays out, as per Lacan, a great part of his work), but as an essential common background. As a conceptual illustration, this common background in the Renaissance painting was the convention of perspective.
Around the corner, there is also Maciunas and the resumption of the avant-garde of ’58 and later, when Lalonde remembers how Marilyn Ferguson said: “every being is an artist”. But that is also an elucidation. The perspective of Cerj is never that of revolt or of babbling Fluxus, but that of philosophical analysis. His art veers toward cosmogony (the aesthetic as theory of style) and could even falter if it reflects the Freudian assertion of the “non-analyzability” of creation (a process that renders futile the antique and therapeutic precept of “Know thyself!” which also is one justification for making art): but frustration will produce neither neuroses (in the sense of a non-shared language) nor a nihilistic gesture.
In short, art is the YES of all, but the Everyman of Lalonde (like the “being” of the citation by Ferguson who stands out on the horizon as a unique destiny of infinite finiteness), – it is the “philosophical man” in which nothing is more distant than ambiguous “Art is easy” by a Giuseppe Chiari. For Lalonde, if art is a pleasure, it is also a struggle because it is a process between opposites. Above all, it is the “process of knowing”.
And when Lalonde reveals that the picture appears to him like an evangelical “good tidings”, he becomes further empowered by the Gnostic inspiration (if non-mystical) of his research. And, above all, he uncovers an experiential facet of painting that for years gave “testimony” to the essentiality of the “verb”, which in Lalonde’s case is color and form.
Finite form is often represented by primary colors since the only path to salvation is always the grid of the archetype. And of science.
Even in the speculative phase, Lalonde has frequently revealed the fascination that people display toward Piero della Francesca and the painting of the Renaissance, but we have said it is the abstraction of the perspective in which the abstraction serves mainly to enliven it. In the classical painting, the rules of perspective (choice of objectification concerning the theory of subjectivity of the Gestalt) would put into the scene an image that alludes to movement. In Lalonde, it is not so much the gesture of the painting being revealed (in this he is closer to Mondrian than to Pollock), but the “gesture of intelligence” as rapport between the artist and the represented that has emanated from his power to represent.
Across these elements that the artist calls `scenario”, where is the space in which the work in front of a progressive experience and collective entity? That on which the artist works is an “infinite perspective” in which the installation in scene – emphasizing – across an experiential Zen matrix, the eternity of time and the infinity of space. This construction furnishes “pretexts” and “contexts” more than true and proper texts. His is a nimble art, made more by silence than by presence.
With regard to the oriental painting, Ales Erjavec, citing Francois Cheng, noted about the emptiness inside a picture, “it is not an inert presence, but it is exchanging breaths that unite the visible world (the painted space) with that invisible one”.
It is noted that Lalonde is a multimedia artist, but more in the camp of the painter (It is funny that passage of his in which the definition of his work, on the pattern of some sensationalistic prose used in contemporary criticism makes him “neo-abstract and contemporary, post-modern or actual, post-neo-constructivist or organic-neo-structuralist (…), to summarize, simply painting”…) do not indicate a middle ground for his preferences, but a precise philosophical sphere, whose mission is that of “communicating a vision” as one recites one of his vast series of works. The word “vision” is semantically rich (in French as in English) and refers either to mechanical processes of the eye and of the processes of the brain, or of the apparition beyond this world. The vision as “object” of relation of the Gestalt, but also as an actor in the event. In Lalonde, the solution may be in this doubt: what if the artistic vision was the true “subject”?
It is not quite the case that one of the more conceptual and programmatic works by Lalonde is the photographic installation “Seeing” (or “Criticism of the Judgment”) in which a room completely painted black accommodates a myriad of eyes on the walls, peering at us like eavesdropping monitors. What is its meaning? If art is always observed, we never need to forget that true art is born from action tied to the spectator and to the work itself. And at the moment, Lalonde presents us exactly with a complex work that is watched like this, but which, above all, from a Lacanian viewpoint, “watches us”.
This conceptual photographic installation (“Seeing”) exhibited in one of the rooms of the Museum of the Castello di Lupinari, has been fully studied in a series of meetings arranged by Professor Suzanne Leclair at Concordia University of Montreal. She promptly placed into context the interaction, in Lalonde, between space and representation, actually finding in the dialectic between emptiness and fullness, light and dark, to see and being seen, the most profound reasoning of his artistic communication.
Still, observing the works of Lalonde the question arises: who really communicates the Vision? The artist? The spectator? Or the work itself?
And one of the fundamental Gordian knots of the theory of contemporary art, which has been amply dealt with by Freud as well as Jacques Lacan and, before him, Merleau-Ponty,- is the vision as occupying an ontological centrum. This conception is not consistent with that of Heidegger, for whom poetry is the language of being. But the “logic of the glimpse”, perceived by Bryson, is that which “sees the representation” not like a mimicry attempt, but in "relation to its internal truth” (Erjavec). It is again Erjavec who remembers it, like Merleau-Ponty indicates: in the painting as the principal route for achieving “Existence”. But philosophy is aspiration to existence; so is awareness of one’s own limit.
Can hunger for perfection be overcome by love of perfection? Would we find ourselves speechless before the exquisite paintings of Piero della Francesca, and would we be able to share our empathy toward this moment of astonishment with others? Do we have the capacity to come to terms with such human emotions? Perhaps we don’t know the answer and are incapable of communicating our senses to others because we are not poets. Then how can we account for that species of dreamer that persists in being astonished by the nimble poetic labor that produces such perfection? Isn’t the total consciousness and unrelenting tension of one who commits to perfection, the being responsible for creating such perfection? If that is so, one such gifted dreamer whose life has been dedicated to that captivating glimpse of the truth through striving for perfection in the creative process is Cerj Lalonde.
In the final analysis, it is from here, from the perspective of the dizzying edge of the limit of man and of his irrepressible drive toward transcendence, that the abstract painting of Cerj Lalonde watches the world from inside himself. In this manner, he becomes the watch warden inside us all.
* Antonina Zaru
Antonina Zaru is an Italian curator and art critic who has organized several exhibitions and retrospectives (from Miro and Magritte to Richard Serra and Nam June Paik) in Museums around the world (New York, Washington, Tokyo, Basel, Austria, Spain, Korea, Rome, Milan, Venice). For many years, she organized the major exhibitions of Nam June Paik (Kunsthalle at Basel, Kunsthaus at Zurick, Statdrische Kunsthalle at Dusseldorf, Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna, Symposium international in Korea, Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Roma, German Pavillon at the Venice Biennale). She is a regulator contributor on art for several art journals and catalogues.
www.CerjLalonde.com