Return to drawing (return to purpose)

Paul Claudel wrote:

“One should not understand (...); one must lose consciousness.”

Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet is present. In the light. In front of the studio.

He takes a few steps—without haste—simply in motion. The movement is calm yet lively, expansive yet grounded. His body already searches, already creates. His posture speaks volumes. You immediately sense his presence—an inner bubbling. His whole stature declares it. His beard and hair, in subtle shades of blond, appear nearly painted. He wears an ecru shirt; his eyes are blue, but also green. He smiles. Then he laughs. Loudly. Engaged in sharing sensitivity and energy, he then welcomes you almost as if you were the only person in the world—with sincerity. Radiant. Timeless. Romantic. Attentive. Strangely, small wisps of smoke drift toward him, barely perceptible. Where do they come from? Some curls claw at his silhouette. He draws them—they draw him. Then they disappear in the next moment. The image is beautiful: one must grasp it, stretch it, imagine these forms around him—gentle and ephemeral: metaphor.

Everything is about the manner in which Gilles Dusabe moves his body in his environment. It’s a relationship to life—sensibly detectable—that shapes a relationship to the world: a world he wants to grasp, knead, taste, embrace—through the manipulation of things, materials, through line, gesture, representation, through art. Art as practice; art as symbolic behavior; art as a field of experimentation; art as universe, as a family connecting all human beings; art as the intangible place of his reason to live, his resilience.

He invites you to enter the studio. The studio is temporary. Temporary is a master word. And the words are major—because they trigger, because they open. They open like artworks. The works are exhibited on walls. The walls are pages—pages of the story he wishes to tell. He invites us to sit down, and offers water, nearly as if beneath a tree of storytelling: one must let oneself be enveloped, to catch the signs, the energy, the substance. The expression is simple yet evocative: some dance through life—others draw it. He draws it.

One must describe this context. On the walls are his paintings composed of astronomical quantities of dots, layers of superposed points. They reference, of course, both artisanal and artistic traditions—from batik to programmatic conceptual art, endurance, gesture, quantum concerns. Action, motion, color, craftsmanship, body and mind at work. The point paintings marked a fundamental period: a concentrated synthesis, a destination, a chapter—each point essential and burning, primordial like a sun caught in an infinite network of suns—a proximity without name, a depth without reason. A network? Just as in the works that followed—abounding in tiny explosions, evoking a plunge into cosmic clouds of dots and stains—chemistry and physics in gestation, often overlaid with traits, lines, reticules, convolutions in which one can well see synapses or rhizomes speaking to us still of life, of blood circulation, of nerves—and also ancient, transgenerational artistic practices: interwoven signs and shapes found across the world since time immemorial, describing roots or the paths of thought and imagination. In short: sensitive cartographies. Then a series of drawings: fragments of bodies, faces—always vibrant images. We sit down. The desire to speak and the desire to listen gradually find balance. Words flow free. Bodies settle. Topics approached in disordered fashion. Memories adjust themselves to the conversation to grasp the complex sequences that brought us here today, in this studio. For the artist is obviously inseparable from everything that shapes him—and more so. Discovery of the arts, video, drawing, photography, the importance of light and color, residencies, journeys, encounters, walking as catharsis and creation, art therapy, experiences, teaching—and the frenzied search for practices that allow existence, that allow one to feel alive. Always vitality. Vitalism. Energy. Autopoiesis. Search for self, the desire to find through ways, to invent oneself.

Speaking about art with Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet is speaking about slalom, wandering, power—as art that saves, as art as connection(s), as art as means while avoiding instrumentalization, as art as cause, as art of existing, as an insatiable will “to be an artist,” as a relationship to truth. Creating: “being truly.”

This sense of belonging to the art world as a community—an international one—is constant. A non-negotiable desire. And the need to make, to manipulate, to stage, to play with materials, forms, images, symbols—visually, plastically, aesthetically—is always the outcome of inner turmoil. A turbulence that leads him to use art as an ever-open toolbox, inspiring him to quote, transform, try everything, cross paths. To creolize. Creolization: a characteristic. Of rare beauty.

“One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” Nietzsche’s phrase in Zarathustra resonates deeply with Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet. He carries it—a chaos. And this chaos acts, propels him, drives him, triggers him. This chaos allows him to move toward. This chaos stimulates him. This chaos keeps him awake—ready to be traversed. No one knows by what magic consciousness is born. Hence trees, thoughts, paths—if anything arose from somewhere or preexists in the universe, or if it results from material activity preparing itself over thousands of years. Even neurologists still ask questions. Beyond nervous impulses, connections, electricity, how does this consciousness exist and live within this powerful and beautiful ecosystem that is the autonomous, extraordinary human body? What makes consciousness enable some individuals to transform universal symbolic behaviors into advanced artistic practices, into discipline? What makes consciousness open the way to what we call sensitivity—specifically the sensitivity to receive a message that can turn a present, beliefs? A pressing issue.

A shift occurred. A crucial revolution. It happened during a long discussion with an artist friend, Ana Silva. More than a conversation, it was a relation around art, around creation, exchanges, collaboration. A maieutic. A revelation. An apocalypse. An epiphany. A flash. A sudden clarity that drawing is the key, that it has always been at work—and will remain so. Drawing as evidence, as second nature. Drawing as path. As materialization of artistic gesture. Drawing as medium. Since the beginning, hidden in different forms. Automatic drawing as self-expression, drawing as sketch, as representation, drawing to heal the soul’s wounds, drawing as extension of the hand and mind. It is the guiding thread, the Ariadne’s thread that allows Theseus out of the Labyrinth. Everything becomes drawing—walking, photography, montage, painting, sculpture. It is a dynamic force—before or beyond any form deposited on a surface—it is melodic, rhythmic, cinematic, poetic to quote nearly in full Jean-Luc Nancy. And this drawing connects us, undoubtedly, to the first lines and traces of our ancestors—on walls, shells, or sand—and to the origins of painting, and to the famous story of the potter’s daughter of Corinth.

Thus a confrontation with a powerful reality took place. Almost shamanic, according to the artist. As if he had given birth—or had been born again. Both. He trembles still. Twice born. Dionysian. Which inevitably recalls his Apollonian counterpart and the dialectic in his work. Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet uses the metaphor of the alembic—initiation, alchemy. The charge is what one has lived, and what emerges, distilled, is the essence. And drawing would be essence—the purest expression of his career and approach—strikingly echoing Soriano’s words:

“drawing and speech are the purest extensions of thought.”

The artist thus surrenders to drawing—to destiny. He who speaks with his hands, chooses drawing as medium and guide, and places himself within the furrows of the ancients—in their marks, their incisions, their grooves—for the pleasure “of the meaning of gesture, of movement, of becoming.” Volumes, spirals, curves, strokes, incisions, smudges, overlays, scratches—they narrate the tremors of soul and body. He wants to let things go, to let himself be traversed, to let things come, to accept trance when drawing, to accept uncertainty, to let the sensitive, the sensory, the desire, the flow act. What constitutes him, the subjects that touch him, thus emerge through drawing.

Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet speaks of drawing with emotion, impulse. He speaks of vibration, sketching, waves, grain, paper, canvas, plexiglas, fluidity, initiation, gesture condensation, flow, waves of heat, gravity, texture, resistance, matter—he loves when it glides, selects his supports, speaks of authenticity, eroticism, and what drawing and desire demand of space and time.

From now on, he fully opens himself to drawing—and drawing opens doors to infinity.

And in Ginette Michaud’s words:

“Drawing is, in this sense, art’s gesture par excellence: an act, a passage—not so much to the act as to the realization of the act itself, live.”

Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet makes it his own. Birth.

Text by Manuel Fadat