This is painting by a walking man. Painting in motion and painting stopped. As with Zeno’s Paradoxes, it is always possible to find an interval of time so minuscule that the distance travelled is nil, and to add it indefinitely to other already accumulated intervals. In this way it is possible to walk without ever reaching the end, to move without travelling an inch, to reduce the entire world to an atom of perception.
This is how Marc Limousin focuses his expression. The first atom is black. Everything else comes from this. It duplicates, multiplies, in a rare atmosphere. It becomes complex. Turns a shade of red or brown. Gold. The flesh of a squashed plum around its stone. That is all.
Perception tells us nothing more, the interval of time is too short. The experience stops here. The canvas is blank again. The black atom returns alone, somewhere near the centre. Soon it will fill the space. Later. We can wait. There is plenty of time. The end is unattainable.
Marc prepares his paint. A long preparation, like walking towards a destination. He releases it briefly, controlling then stemming the flow, not giving it time to spread. Some inks. Subtly blending and repelling. Then comes the act of painting. A fragment of movement in a great void of stillness. The work of body to body, of observation, of shaping. The colour expands. Forces of gravity weigh on the light, bending it down until it lies in the bed of the Earth, tilting it on its axis. Gripping it, sometimes twisting it. The speck of a universe settles on the canvas, still marked by geometry, already faded by chaos, both contingent and free.
And then it is finished. During the unfolding duration of the work, a flash of perception lodges itself, a microscopic moment, a piece of the past, silent, isolated, devoid of meaning.
Marc Limousin is a surveyor, a furrower of paths, a spectator of nature. He has filled thousands of hours with these instantaneous intervals, accumulating perceptions. Now he works by night, seeking brevity, between constriction and expansion. He isolates ephemeral structures in the continuous, deafening stream of sensations. He simplifies, lays bare, purifies, reduces to the shortest moment, and then inscribes, choreographs, one might say. He filters time through a grille so fine that our gaze is lightened. It is a bit like freezing a butterfly in flight.
For him, it is rare for material to reach the edges of the canvas. The instant is too short. It remains suspended, stopped, silent and raw, reflecting no other end than the patient, asymptotic search for a vision of brevity captured in the toils of colour.
