You look like a patina 

Exhibition essay by Alexander Rondeau

I was sitting in the shower, drinking a Lost Coast Brewery Revenant IPA, thinking that I would name this essay “Appreciation.” In part because it becomes a strange word when floating alone as the page header, but mostly because Freshwater, California based artist Marceau Verdiere’s paintings are moments of appreciation for the value of things that have themselves depreciated over time precisely because objects, places, and sometimes even people surrender themselves to the world, and wear a surrender so beautiful it becomes porous, cracked, or even rusted. 

The calm, the storm and the forgotten in between… is a crescendo of Verdiere’s aesthetic and artistic exploration of oil paints across many years. Verdiere’s work immediately reads as abstract — perhaps expressionist, or to others, postmodernist, with his sensibilities towards color and mark-making. A large part of Verdiere’s process is simply being receptive to his surroundings, and noticing the textured density of the world around him. For example, to Verdiere, rust on a bonfire pit, as he once pointed out to me, was not simply rust, but a lived-in mark made by the steel’s continued unwavering resistance to flames and rains alike — rust, as we then see through Verdiere’s eyes, is a metaphorical reminder of how the world shapes us. Verdiere is interested particularly in what he finds to be the beauty of the ordinances at hand, like a flâneur, French as he is [1]. By making large canvases of these little moments, he is attributing value through scale. Once Verdiere has found a point of inspiration, he then commits himself to rendering its affective qualities across his canvases like an impressionistic impulse, yet his paintings ultimately manifest as abstract works. If we were to take a macro photograph of the rust along a bonfire pit without any clear visual framing that could allow us to discern what the object in question is, would the resulting photograph of brittle ocre orange not be likened to an abstract painting? Perhaps, then, the artist is not so easily lumped into the long tradition of abstract painting insofar as he is less concerned with the self-reflexivity of painting in favor of what he calls “the patina of the soul.” 

Verdiere’s practice — both in his aesthetic choices and his impulses that guide him on what to paint — is deeply informed by Japanese aesthetic philosophies, which were honed during an artist residency at Studio Kura in Fukuoka, Japan. Centrally, wabi-sabi celebrates imperfection throughout the cyclical, natural progression along the arcs of growth and decay. Wabi-sabi is also characterized by an appreciation for weathering and simplicity, like a patina. Concurrently, Verdiere’s work immediately conjures the modernist impulses of abstract expressionist painting, which is admittedly in epistemic tension with the aforementioned wabi-sabi. The philosophical underpinnings of modernist painting created a self-reflexive dialogue wherein painting was about painting, and there was a push towards the flatness of the frame. We then start to see the tension that The calm, the storm and the forgotten in between… has nestled itself into: The wabi-sabi influences emphasize a material history, whereas the modernist turn towards abstraction centralized a material presentness dislodged from the vestiges of time, existing uniquely in the present moment and sheltering away from context. Essentially, Verdiere is thus referencing two very different painting lineages 1) The wabi-sabi tradition of leaning into texture caused by existing through time in the world around us, whereas 2) The modernist tradition aspired to remove itself from a sense of time and to avoid the context of the world around us. 

These dialogically divergent aesthetic and epistemic referents begin to find resolution in the layout of paintings throughout the exhibition’s sequencing; we see a resistance to the formulaic, grid-like approach of an equidistant hang to instead develop groupings of paintings that find themselves in intimate conversations with one another. The decision to create vignettes instead of a carefully measured division of space reminds us that the very worlds these works emerge from are ones that we too are in dialogue with, and not held at a perfectly uniform distance from. In one particular instance, an L-shaped grid of three paintings intimates a missing fourth piece in the top left corner, but it is difficult to discern exactly in which way it is missing. Whereas Verdiere’s works capture subtle changes that feel imperceptible in-real-time, like rust and erosion, we may thus ascertain that the absent fourth slot is haunted by a vignette that has withered to its complete dissolution, or inversely, the empty space points towards an effigy that is not yet undone to the rabid bits of time, but whose ephemerality is accounted for.

In the gallery’s center, a plinth holds four wooden sculptural face masks, each bearing indifferent grins. Titled The Critics, these maquettes are set to the sightline backdrop of Nailhead Haiku, one of the largest paintings in the exhibition. This particular sightline almost makes a positive and a negative pairing as The Critics and Nailhead Haiku are near exact inversions of each other’s dark and light color palettes and formal qualities. This inversion thus reveals the internalization versus externalization of criticism when placing art in the realm of public discourse, such as in a museum. At its core, The Critics asks: Is the mysterious figure of the critic, or the artist himself – operating as a stand-in for all of us – the largest source of criticism? It bears remembering, perhaps for all of us, that criticism can also be the articulation of the good and of positive assessments.

As we turn our attention to the titles of individual pieces, for example, A glow your jitters can’t obscure, Verdiere’s sense of humor emerges as an acknowledgment of the difficulty in immortalizing that which disappears from this world. We then see amassed together in Verdiere’s solo exhibition an appreciation of weathered material history, aesthetic contradictions between formal and spiritual purity of modernist painting trajectories, and humor and melancholy — a turbulent, multivalent collection that we can find waiting for us in the exhibition’s title: Calmness, Storminess, and forgotten In Betweens. 

[1]  The Beaudelarian concept of the “flâneur” references a leisurely observer strolling through the city while reflecting on its aesthetic and social dimensions, first pontificated in 19th-century Paris.