Love Letter proudly presents Foule, A2, A3, personne, a group of painted works and a wall of drawings by Michel Bayetto.
An unnamed crowd stretched out in the format of a large painting (Anthropocène series), backs of heads in portrait size (John Doe series): this is the world that Michel Bayetto sets out to paint, “or rather, to depict”, as he says. His use of oil paint, worked with extreme care from dark backgrounds and over a long period of time (“the time it takes to apply the glazes”, he adds) consists in stripping the figures of any identity, and of any recognisable narrative. “The colours are the protagonists”, says the artist. Together or separately, the figures become “persons”: they are the John Does that Bayetto has chosen as the title for his series of portraits of necks that barely stand out against a background. In English-speaking countries, that surname, feminised as Jane Doe, designates an unidentified person: an ‘X’, a ‘some·any·one’. These Lambda people may or may not be in actions, or in stories of which the cause, outcome, or even location are unknown to us. The painting becomes the site of the encounter itself.
Michel Bayetto keeps art history in mind, from Georges Seurat to Agnes Martin. Like these painters, he understands that in order to become a meeting place, painting had to render its models inexpressive: photographs torn from a magazine or pointed out by a friend (Anthropocène series), ghosts or fantasies imagined by the artist (John Doe series), or life drawing models (Plages series, E-Jizz series, Acolytes series). By erasing their inner life in the fabric of the material, the works of Bayetto compose an optical theatre of pose, silence and shadows. “Colours, as fluid events, gradually become the bearers of a subjective existence,’ he explains. They refer to something floating in a world where inside and outside are irrelevant.
Elisabeth Lebovici
Translation Catherine Facerias
