Painting for the day | Tandem | Films

Alain Séchas invites us to spend a day in his studio to follow the creation of a painting.

About

Synopsis

Alain Séchas invites us to spend a day in his studio to follow the creation of a painting. Zen and tongue-in-cheek, he tells while painting his link with his favorite subject: his anthropomorphic cat.

The artist

Alain Séchas was born in 1955 in Colombes (92).
Visual artist, he lives and works in Paris.
He is represented by the Laurent Godin gallery in Paris.

Technical data

Director	Vassili Silovic
Cinematographer	Eric Genillier
Original music	Denis Uhalde
Duration	09:11

Chronicle

Alain Séchas, the sorcerer’s apprentice

Time spent doing nothing is not wasted in creation. Thus, for Vassili Silovic, filming an artist at work is not about choosing the moments when he paints. On the contrary, the director leaves time for the deserted space, the comings and goings in the studio, the waiting brushes. The work is in gestation, upstream of the gesture, in the nonchalance of pace, in the pensive halts and the rearrangements of the room.

For a maturing process such as this one, the film foregoes the ultrasound. Between Alain Séchas and his creatures, a dialogue develops, mutely, like an encounter that has left him transformed. As if blowing a raspberry at Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film, it’s ‘The Mystery of Séchas’ that Silovic's film has depicted. The canvases do not have the transparency of X-rayed flesh, but the unctuous thickness of fresh paint.

The artist still has the occupations of childhood. Arms dangling, he sits down to dream. On the canvas, he contemplates a man-cat that reflects back at him the bewildered gaze of one discovering his image for the first time. He draws as if to disguise, and his characters each have their own symbolic attribute. To the player her racket, and to the Indian, half-distempered by his war paint, his feathers.

In this schoolboy world, the camera has fun. The cameraman hides in the mirror at the back and the sound technician’s shadow appears next to a cat with an erection that hands him the boom.

The paint, spread out in broad strokes, is filmed close-up to render the wet sound of trampled mud. The colours smack like the rubber of the washing-up gloves with which Alain Séchas has armed himself and which give the wearer his allure of a sorcerer's apprentice.

Sylvie Lopez-Jacob
Bourges, September 2019

With an agrégation in philosophy and a PhD in the semiology of texts and images, Sylvie Lopez-Jacob teaches at secondary school, and at the National Superior School of Art of Bourges.Her long-standing focus has been on bringing the encounter between art and philosophy to fruition. Cinema remains a privileged field of investigation in her lectures and articles. She has led numerous educational projects centred on questions of aesthetics in collaboration with painters, playwrights and writers including Yves Michaud, Pierre Bergounioux, Claude Viallat and Claude Lévèque...