Over the past two years Sylvie Arlaud has developed the concept of the BEATLES and PASSERS-BY into a new theme: DETOURS.
The protagonists of this new subject are Mahatma Gandhi and Boris Vian. A luminary figure and a rebellious artist are contrasting individuals in a long line of revolutionaries. Kunst als Aufschrei [Art as Outcry]: Sylvie Arlaud remains consistently true to her theme, again picking out characters who stand for change and upheaval. They are united by the courage to bring political and social views into the public eye in an uncompromising and radical manner. Gandhi uses peaceful means (marches, boycott, hunger strike) to fight against the suppression of his own people, whilst Vian writes, sings and makes music against entrenched moral ideas and political grievances. Just like the Beatles, they are ahead of their own time.
Sylvie Arlaud limits her palette of colours – already greatly reduced for PASSERS-BY – exclusively to shades of black and white. The advantages are twofold. The new paintings take on the appearance of reportage to match the characters of the figures in the pictures. Gandhi is the enlightened one, clad in the simple robes of an ascetic. His colours are white and radiant. It is only next to him that the darkness surrounding Boris Vian really stands out. He is the perfect foil, this man of the night, attired in black and constantly stalked by the threat of death owing to a heart defect since early adolescence.
Whereas in previous works the picture space was conceived as a stage for a compilation of individual scenes and gradually faded into anonymity, the reverse is now true. The space shrinks, disappearing in favour of the figure, until it ultimately becomes an interior space that evolves behind the faces of the protagonists. Also a photographer, Sylvie Arlaud works with different focal lengths. She zooms closer and closer in to her subjects to achieve a format-busting portrait.
As a result, the tension between concrete and abstract elements is ever present. As the space becomes smaller, however, so the individual features become clearer.
“Natural Mystic” and “L’Automne à Pékin” [“Autumn in Beijing”] display the space-figure-diffusion typical of Sylvie Arlaud. The expressive style of painting bursts with vitality and highlights the activities of both individuals, who are only seen in silhouette. Walking stick and trumpet serve as adjuncts that lend identity to Gandhi and Vian in the picture. “Galata” is the prelude to a series of pictures in which Gandhi and Vian might meet up. This never happened in real life. Sylvie Arlaud again uses photomontage as a means of constructing a world of pictures which is a patchwork composition of different real worlds: a device to emphasise the pair’s similar ethos. Sylvie Arlaud develops intimacy through body language and facial expression. To the observer, Gandhi and Vian look like a couple of old friends.
In Sylvie Arlaud’s individual portraits the faces are partly blurred or a set of rigid, mask-like features. This balancing act between softening and hardening creates a barrier, confounding viewers and forcing them to look again. The eye is drawn to the space lying behind the faces – thinking space namely.
For Sylvie Arlaud, DETOURS is a triumphant return to more powerful, yet understated, figuration. The interchangeable nature of the subjects – which have so far remained anonymous – gives way to a new individuality. Rather than slipping into the role of the figure, the viewer now finds an opposite number with whom he is able to communicate.
Stefanie Schwarzbach, arthistorian, October 2008
When Paul Gauguin created his famous painting “From where do we come from” in 1897, he already lived since a quite long time at Tahiti, far away from all kind of hectic civilisation.
On a broad size he combined motifs of earlier paintings, in order to treat the question of being by bending the bow from the birth to the death. Hereby, groups of figures illustrate stations of life, which each one of us has to go through.
Although Sylvie Arlaud lives and works in a totally opposed world, her paintings arise the same question. As social-critical artist she does not have to turn away from the civilisation in order to get to philosophical-serious contents of painting, she has the direct look at it. Her painting setting is the modern city, in which a stream of people is moving, anonymously and accidentally: passers-by.
By doing so she has got an imagination of the city in her mid, which does not come from a glitter advertising folder (city with nice skyline). For her the city is a moloch of places and street blocks with cold house-fronts, behind which danger is lurking and often poverty is hidden. Her picture of the city is similar to a quick hoisted suburbian quarter.
She translates the topic of the big city with a few, decent allusions. Frameworks of lines symbolise in the vertical narrow correlated apartment houses or they imitate mirroring window-surfaces. They close the screen in the background. Lying on the floor, they serve as perspective pattern, which creates areas to enter.
A dull stage develops, which has street life spirit in an over-dimensional horizontal front. The passer-by, which by definition is a “passing-by-person” gets a running surface on which he can go along.
Sylvie Arlaud’s passers-by are enindividualised figures, often faceless, almost like shadow figures. Certain, one can recognise still details of clothes, which allow to guess a sketchy imagination of the sex or a classification into adults and children. But that is not what it is all about. The shape is drawing an anonymous body in movement. Inevitably one has to think on sculptural topics: the walking, the stepping, the hesitating, the running, the staying, lately the crouching person, too.
Her figures are not modelled in a plastic way. They are transparent figures, which are taken out of newspapers or photographs. They derive from a two-dimensional, predefined reality which she “manipulates” by photomontage an additional time. The templates are showing stars, such as the Beatles, misery, given a body in a Palestinian father, sheltering his son, an old woman at an elegant promenade, an eloping child. The original content of the information is getting lost through the pictorial handling. Sylvie Arlaud treats all figures in her paintings the same way, no matter which status they have in their real world. This is what corresponds to her imagination of the street as a place of accidentally encounters, her imagination of life. Human beings of different origin meet each-other for different reasons, with different targets, at different times. Some of them do not anticipate the danger, which is threatening them, others are crouched of a deathly fear, longing or unconscious, ignorant or caring, famous or not.
Reduced to a bodily impulse of movement, her groups of figures are at the same time anonymous crowds of people and dynamic vibrations. They stride the pictoral space in a direction-oriented way. They are constructed for the viewer. They pass by him like a crowd of lemmings, side-faced, from left to right, bounce growing, almost menacing to him or all together turn around and fade away in the background of the painting. The existencial expression of a certain feeling, like e.g. Edvard Munch is expressing in “The Scream” in the face, is here getting divided to an anonymous movement of a crowd.
The human being is in a state of decomposition. Without mimic or gestic, he turned into an exchangeable object, which can be coalesced without any problems with the pictorial space. Blurring interfere layers of colour, scumbling lay-down of colour, enables the figure partially to affiliate with the space. Often extremities, which do not serve the movement of the body, sink into the attached shade. Figure and space penetrate each other. This effect is strongly intensified by reflections, repetitions and fractures.
The colour is detached from the form. The artist uses the knowledge of the doctrine of colour and often applies flat red as a forward-impulse or builds the pulling effect by cold tones of blue. Assisted by the dynamic of red-blue, the multi-layered figure-ground composition turns into vibration.
Increasingly she abandons strong contrasts of colours. Willing to activate the penetration of area and figure, she weakens the instrinsic value of colour by admixtion of black-white-tones. The single surfaces are more heavily weaved into each other. Different tones of gray dominate now the painting and conceive a bleared undertone, which fits to the problematic of the big city.
At this part one has to distinguish clearly between paintings and collages. She combines in collages her joy of colours.
When painting, the colourful surfaces, which are cut into shape and are fit into the area come into life, so to say incidentally. Before she applies the colour on the canvas, she tries out its effect. These colour tests, which she develops on paper, near by the canvas, serve as original material for the collages.
Since 2002 Sylvie Arlaud has been working on the topic “passers-by”. Starting with a photography of the Beatles, which shows the famous fungi-heads as a loose four-group in the middle of the Mars field in Paris, she develops first signs to the anonymisation of the figures and to the construction of the picture field. Groups of figures stagger the space, which is produced significantly by a perspective framework of lines. These first works have a very plastic effect. Space and figure are far from being mutated into a transparent unity.
In the past 5 years she developed consequently these approaches. Her figures descended from very different realities – picked out to take over specific functions in the picture – such as the fleeing or bowed figure, e.g.
Just like a stage manager of the “Nouvelle Vague”, Sylvie Arlaud sets up individual pictures – abrupt shifting of scenes alike – into a fragmentary-constructed picture area. Her fugitive figures seem to have been taken from public webcams, without further reference to its place of exhibition. Time and place are interchangeable.
The picture area and the figures in it are held so anonymous and crossed into another, that the viewer can find himself in each of these figures. Therefore, the passers-by of Sylvie Arlaud awake in us a funny emotion of familiarity. We feel immediately affected, are meditative and even the question rises in us which have been mentioned at the beginning.
Stefanie Schwarzbach, arthistorian, October 2007
ART AS SCREAM, as ambassador, as love, as search for an independent harmony and an individual poetic form-language; as a try to approach from a dependant “by chance” fragile reality, the contradiction between its permanent building-up and decomposition.
THE ABSTRACT TURNS INTO CONCRETE. I am especially fascinated by the try to combine “Automation” with graphical suitability. I do not mean a describing, but an explanatory coherence, where architectonical and emotional alikeness are more important than plastic illustration. I want to hold in check the plastic illusion and its narrative effect as much as I can, although I want to give a social content and much space to the viewer in order to get into the spirit of the painting. By rupture, transparency, perspective, overlapping surfaces with continuous lines, concentrations and left-open parts, I try to express space by the effect of colour, more than by modelling. My emotion of an unstable and complex reality leads me to insert repetitions to produce the impression of reflection, atmospheric effects and erosion. By a coming and going between construction and destruction a multilayered, reduced figure-space-creation comes into life.
To go forward “automatically” asks for courage and looseness… especially because I have the demand to keep the plasticity of the painting. Again and again I am confronted with the paradox task of the whish to present something unwillingly.
Sylvie Arlaud, 2005
"... whereas ..., Sylvie Arlaud projects this atmosphere of awakening onto the four Beatles who have been the inspiration for the young generation's emotions from the 1960's to this day. In different works the Beatles advance to mystical shadow figures, stepping out of the red & grey ether of the past, placing themselves in the temporary centre of a development that furrows through the space with patterns in perspective. Whether as dark silhouettes against the light-blue horizon or as pop collages, the quadriga matures into a metaphysical motto, a symbol for a revolution's sweeping power, as it were tranquil, awesome, and a little threatening. ..."
Tobias Öller, Merkur Miesbach, December 2004
Corpus and space is also a topic with which Sylvie Arlaud deals with.
Her basic material is a photography of Terence Spencer showing “The Beatles”. By this, the English pop band stands for the symbol of a fundamental change of a new time, as an icon of alteration and movement.
Sylvie Arlaud plays with the contracts of known, famous-unknown, non-definable.
The popularity of the Beatles is winded-up in anonymity. The figures, shapes as shadows, come up out of nowhere. Dark, faceless, in life-size. They stride forward to the viewer and they seem almost threatening. For this it needs space, which Sylvie Arlaud constructs via perspective line construction. The irregular architectonic graceful structures win clarity in the front, which stresses the forward impulse. Also the coloration supports this dynamic: Red pushes the background of the picture into the front. Blue enables a pulling effect into the background. The transparent colour-apply combines the figures with the space. Gestural, dynamic dashed-off colour-layers penetrate each other and decompose partially the figures.
Sylvie Arlaud is interested in the transitions between the visibility and the un-visibility, between the tangible and abstract. Processes of decomposition and concentration give her paintings a dynamic vibration.
Stefanie Schwarzbach, arthistorian, November 2004