“Ở đây, ở đó và ở khắp mọi nơi”
(“Here, there and everywhere”)
The exhibition “Ở đây, ở đó và ở khắp mọi nơi” explores the invisible links that unite personal history and artistic practice. Through five portraits of people essential to Ho Chi Minh City's art scene, this series questions how each individual existence is shaped by an encounter between heritage and environment, between past and present, between cultures. These artists, creators and cultural figures are not only witnesses to their times, but also individuals who, through their work, forge profound connections between their personal histories and the society around them.Each of the people I present in this exhibition embodies, in their own way, the delicate balance between tradition and modernity, between the Vietnam of yesterday and the Vietnam of today. I feel they are pivotal to the evolution of Ho Chi Minh City's art scene, a place where influences intersect and history takes shape in contemporary art. The oil portraits I present are also a mirror of my own search for identity. Of Vietnamese descent through my grandmother, I grew up between two worlds, that of the West and that of Vietnam. This duality feeds my art, where every brushstroke is an attempt to honor both cultures. The link between these portraits and my painting practice in oil, almost lacquered, is also a way of reconnecting with my Vietnamese heritage, while celebrating the richness and diversity of influences that each culture brings to my approach. Through this exhibition, I seek to build bridges, to offer an intimate vision of these figures who, while remaining deeply rooted in their own history, contribute to writing the history of contemporary art in Ho Chi Minh City. Through the prism of their existence and on the occasion of these portraits, I invite you to reflect on how the links between the past, the individual and culture can be expressed in art, and how these links, sometimes subtle, shape our lives and our creations.
ALL DOORS OPENED
When I enter the studio, there's a gigantic plant in front of me. It swirls. In the center is a ball of light. Maybe it's the sun. Maybe it's the moon.
I started painting this exhibition during the rainy season in Ho Chi Minh City. Everything around me was dark and sweaty. I loved that energy. Here I've heard that the rainy season is the romantic season. In my Ho Chi Minh City studio, I understood. Rain soothes the city. Gestures become slower, more tender, noise becomes more muted, leaving room for things that are fragile and imperceptible. Thus the city becomes darker and micro-movements appear.
This exhibition is called. All doors opened. It refers to a poem I had in mind which talks about being transpierced by the world. And about speaking and living and existing with the words of the world.
All doors opened
In all the sounds that I hear,
I’ll be talking with your words.
and if you crave to eat me
I’ll be your flesh
I’ll hold you closer
And in the storm, And in the rain
I’ll be sitting here
All doors opened
I kept repeating these words on my scooter. I rode fast into the night, and saw the lights become lines around me.
In my cement apartment, the rain drummed and the walls became waterfalls.
My body was changing, transforming as I spent more time in this city, and I let the surroundings wash over me. As an extension of my body, my painting also changed. It became sweaty, fast, watery.
That's how this exhibition came about.
For me, it's an exhibition about light, about the resistance of light. This exhibition is a loss of rigidity to enter into a form of fragility. I'm talking about the resistance of light in the sense of Pasolini, when he refers to the survival of fireflies in cities. In big cities, we can't see fireflies because they're illuminated by blinding lights. But they do exist. And if we turn off these lights, if we leave a space for them to express themselves, then they become visible.
It seems to me that I'm referring to this when I talk about the thousands of images that surround us, and about restoring their preciousness to images, to existences.
This exhibition consists of six portraits of women and portraits of plants. All these paintings are like portals. They open onto a world of recognition. A world of multitude, presenting fragmented existences.
For me, these people and entities are mystical encounters.
If I read my life like a holy book, if I make an exegesis of it, then these paintings are paintings of icons. In the most religious sense of the word.
The icon is what it opens up to a whole world.
I like to think of the people I meet as pivotal figures in my life, teaching figures who imply a transformation of the ontological narrative.
All doors opened' speaks of this too, of a form of empathy, of allowing oneself to be traversed by the story, the word of the other.
The portraits look at you wherever you are in the room. I paint the eyes in such a way that they follow and accompany you. In this sense, the paintings become mystical figures of a shared narrative that involves the person entering the exhibition room.
These portraits can thus be seen as paintings of icons.
For me, these portraits also refer to a bullfighting term. A porta gayola. It's a figure I grew up with (even though I dislike the concept of corrida) It's when the bullfighter kneels in front of the door, the toril, and waits for the bull to enter the ring. The matador knows nothing about the bull entering the ring. There's a kind of submission to what's happening, and at the same time a kind of grace and courage that for me, and what's common to all these portraits, is the courage to live a life, the courage of fragility.
Perhaps what I want to talk about is the opposite of courage. Perhaps, as Paul B Preciado said, being and following a righteous life in the musical sense of the term is precisely a form of radical anti-courage. But an alignment and an existence diametrically linked to what surrounds it.
Our Tongues Have the Taste of Powder
By Romain Noël
Translation from French by Reiss Joshua Madden
When I look upon the new paintings of Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont, I am seized by a shiver which, if I am to believe the title of the exhibition, is perhaps above all a kind of powdering. It’s one of my favorite verbs: to powder. For me it has always been synonymous with dissolution and disappearance, love and destruction. It is a term that I have always taken in a very sensual, almost erotic way. When things begin to powder, they open up, intertwine, and break through to the world in streams of particles. Powdering is an amorous emulsion, which transforms everything in its path.
It is often remarked, and rightly so, that Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont works in the tradition of the great masters of the Renaissance, and that her portraits employ the formal vocabulary of these masters. However, from another perspective, such remarks mislead us as to the deeper meaning of her pictorial practice. And for good reason, it is not a question of the artist continuing the tradition of humanist portraiture, but rather to create the possibility of representing creatures belonging a priori to the human species in a resolutely anti-humanist manner. Where humanist portraiture sought to represent its subjects by insisting on the enlightened character of their power, Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont’s portraits seek, on the contrary, to represent the strictly non-human dimension of those she paints. For the human as instituted by humanism is less a biological fact than a title, in the honorific sense of the term: a dignity, as Pico della Mirandola wrote in his famous treatise. The archetypal humanist subject was (and in some ways still is) a powerful white man, the exceptions only proving the rule. Some centuries later, Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont offers us an alternative. By this I mean: a crack in the paradigm, a line of flight, a breath of fresh air, the promise of a darker and freer life. This is how I believe we should understand her use of non-conforming colours in the treatment of her models' complexions. Indeed, in her painting, the artist seems to seek to invent another way of being human, where the dominant dignity is finally erased in favour of a truly living life where blues, mauves, pinks and violets manage to nourish the possibility of a common existence.
From my point of view, the powdering evoked in the title of the exhibition must be understood as a real promise of powerlessness. That said, I can’t help but feel that, behind the title of the exhibition, a more rebellious formulation is emerging: “Our tongues hate the state of power”. Our tongues, that is to say our stories, our narratives, our lived lives and our legendary existences hate the stasis of power. They prefer powdery ecstasy. This is why Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont relies on storms and volcanoes as she relies on loved ones. She knows that only the friendship of tornadoes and fire will one day allow her to pass to the other side, where tongues touch in the dark and work for the triumph of love, as shown by the arrows incapable of reaching the lovers depicted in one of the paintings in the exhibition.
I insist: artists must be taken seriously. Poets must be taken seriously. Painters must be taken seriously. All those who seek to formulate, in their practice, the possibility of another world must be taken seriously. For these formulas, as magical as they are, do well and truly work. But it is still necessary to make oneself available to them. It is not enough, to follow Chloë Saï and her friends to the lands where the black paste proliferates, to contemplate her paintings with an aesthetic eye. Rather, one must accept to enter oneself, with all one’s heart, in the state of powerlessness that unfolds there. One must accept, even desire, the fact that black paste is not just black paste, but a state-of-the-art technology, conceived with great difficulty to accomplish things that, believe me, are worth doing.
Ultimately, the question is not about painting as an expression of high culture, but rather about the actual medium of the practice of applying coloured pigments to a flat surface. I close my eyes and let the paintings flow through me. That is to say: I let the pictorial matter pass through me, I let the images pass through me, I let the creatures behind the images pass through me. It forms a vortex around me. Like a tornado which, it is true, could carry me away. It’s a risk worth taking and I take it because Chloë Saï in some way teaches us: painting, like truly living life, is risky. I am reminded of 'The Wizard of Oz', where it is precisely a tornado that carries Dorothy away from her native Kansas to the strange land of Oz where she will live her adventure.
For all these reasons, it seems to me that the work of Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont, as it appears in this exhibition, touches on something like the truth of the apocalypse. Indeed, the time of the apocalypse is neither the time of regression nor the time of progression; neither the time of decline nor the time of social or scientific progress. The time of the apocalypse is the time of ecstasy (in the elementary sense of leaving the self), the time of transmutation. When the apocalypse strikes me, it creates a portal within me. If I manage to locate this portal precisely and pass through it, then things change and life is radically transformed. It’s a story of destiny. A fiction to be written. A desire to be implemented. All the paintings here could then function as a kind of apocalyptic threshold, articulating before our eyes the human and the non-human, the known and the unknown. The friends portrayed, who have become gatekeepers of another world, wait like sphinxes for us to answer the riddles that emanate from their colourful bodies. It is up to us to cross over to the other side, because in reality everyone knows the answer to the riddle, as proven by the way our bodies melt when it is spoken. In the end, we are once again like Dorothy: fear grips us and we seek help to return home. Yet the open portals remain open forever, and forever our lives will remain transformed.
I NEVER BROKE UP WITH YOU —
words by Romain Noël
I love this title because it calls forth both the impermanence of relationships and their eternity. If we consider love, friendship and all our other relationships from the perspective of a linear timeline, it is as though they are amputated. In order to touch their dark truth, we need a paradigm shift and to pass in a quantum conception of time. Indeed, on the quantum level, everything that happens happens forever. The most seemingly insignificant of experiences - the shortest kiss, the smallest piece of fruit I put in my mouth, the slightest hint of a landscape hitting my retina - swirl in space and exist there infinitely. This does not mean that we are condemned to relive what once happened, but that we will have to navigate through everything that was, is and will be, even if we cannot see anything and can trust only the sonar of our beating heart. I never broke up with you, the memory of the world never ceases to testify. The sum of our attachments draws in the dark night the possibility of a romance that only you and I can fulfill. I never broke up with you. All the forms that once affected us continue to swirl around us. For all these reasons, I do not believe that the notion of representation is the most appropriate to reflect what is happening in Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont’s painting. The artist does not reflect on the image, as is often said of those who apply pigments to flat surfaces. Her pictorial research is rather concerned with sensations, feelings, that is to say what we perceive, what we feel, what affects us and changes our lives, again forever.
A few months ago, perhaps even a few years ago, I undertook a performance where I proposed to the people present that they implant an acacia thorn in their left hand by means of a latex prosthesis applied directly to their skin. I then posted a photo in which one could see a thorn emerging from my own hand. Having seen it in passing, Chloë Saï asked me to send her the photo, with the idea of painting it. Her request was all the more understandable since I had bought her a small painting, a few months earlier, in which one could see a drop of blood pearling from a finger touching a rose thorn. I tell this anecdote because I believe it carries a kind of secret knowledge: what interests Chloë Saï are the thorns that prick us and secretly enhance us. The affected creature, now an emotional creature, is covered with thorns. These thorns form less a protective device than a sensitive archive of the affects she has experienced. Now it seems to me that this is exactly what Chloë Saï’s painting is working towards: to compose a sensitive archive of the affects that we go through and that go through us. Affection is interstitial, taking place between things where hybrid creatures are born that we call relationships. Chloë Saï uses paint to navigate through these interstitial waters.
This story of sensitive archives and intermediate worlds reminds me of what occultists sometimes call the Akashic record. This is a kind of cosmic memory of an etheric nature, which, like a sensitive film, would record the events of the world. These recordings would come to feed a kind of deposit of phantom forms where all lived experiences would be reproduced as images, in the very broad sense of imaginary forms. I like to imagine this archive as a big house suspended in space, or as a moving cabinet with thousands of drawers. Chloë Saï’s cassettes resemble, I believe, all those documents piled up in this four-dimensional cabinet-house.
By embracing the world from this perspective, we understand why Chloë Saï’s portraits have, despite appearances, nothing to do with the pictorial genre of the same name. The great tradition of the portrait aimed at pictorially transcribing the personality of a subject, mobilizing for this purpose a symbolic grammar capable of informing us about their identity. Of course, Chloë Saï adopts certain stylistic traits specific to this tradition, and in particular to the art of the Renaissance, but make no mistake: her portraits seek to approach something radically different. They will never serve as identity papers. Quite the opposite: the painting here disfigures and de-identifies. What Chloë Saï gives us is a wonderful gift. Moreover, all the figures she paints hold in their hands, or clutch to their hearts, small paintings on wood that really exist and that the artist has been composing for years, as if to form a constellation of islands which, if connected in the right way, would undoubtedly reveal a sort of portal allowing access to a dark zone in whose reliefs I already perceive the vibrations of another world. By placing her friends on this threshold, the artist seems to make them the guardians or guides of the zone that lies behind. For this reason, I cannot conceive of the portraits of Chloë Saï’s as anything other than mystical portraits, in the wildest sense of the word. The dark zone that Chloë Saï documents in a low voice is not really her secret garden. It is in fact a common zone – perhaps even the most common of all – and it seems to me that the artist chooses her subjects precisely because of their specific connections with this dark place. It is not surprising, therefore, that the area in question is directly related to the feelings one feels for beings, things or representations. Friendship, in the broadest sense of the term, is thus the emotional substance from which all the work of Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont seems to proceed.
Shortly after we first met, Chloë Saï confided in me that she had discovered a substantially liquid and sometimes even wavy black paste which, she said, surrounds us and passes through us. The nature of this discovery immediately enchanted me. And for good reason; I had just written a text in which I affirmed my desire to make the human being melt into tears, and the possibility of happiness seemed to me more and more like a matter of dissolution. Chloë Saï had read this text and had written me a very beautiful email entitled “ok to be a tear”. I thought that was so right. She perfectly understood that a decision had to be made: to melt or not to melt, to become a tear or not to become a tear, to enter the common zone or not to enter it. There was no doubt that she had made her choice. I can still imagine her, groping her way yet with confidence to the slimy land where all tears converge and dark matter thrives. Today, all of this is so much a part of her life that the black paste vibrates all over her canvases. I deem this a triumph, even if it’s something very dark and deeply spectral.
From my point of view, this story of black paste comes to prove the primary equivalence of our aesthetic concerns and our visceral quests. To put it another way: Chloë Saï once made an important discovery: she passed somewhere and decided to document this passage and perhaps even to reveal its secret, so that everyone could make the journey; she then summoned all her technical skills in order to concoct a kind of pictorial potion which acts, I believe, as a true revealer, in the almost apocalyptic sense of the term. The black paste reveals the truth of her work: her extraordinary paintings are not only intended to represent the complexity of subjectivity or to document a personal archive, but also, and above all else, to open the doors to another dimension, where everything is entangled until supreme softness. Chloë Saï Breil- Dupont thus composes her own secret society, while taking care to leave all the doors open so that the common zone remains open forever.
The Unknown Beginning of a Very Long Story
Nicodim Bucharest
‘Life begins and ends in the unconscious; the actions we carry out while fully lucid are only little islands in an archipelago of dreams.'
Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus, 2019 —
In the centre of the space, as in the centre of the plastic reflection, is the black paste. A boundless puddle, a dark and infinite ocean. It sticks, clings to our flesh, envelops us and overtakes us. We, the terrestrials, the individuals of a transtemporal ecosystem. The black paste is our immensity. It agglomerates the memories, the secrets, the silences that constitute us, in the present, as well as in the past and the future. The black paste is in us, around us, yet, often, it escapes us. It binds us to others, human and non-human. It is the invisible part of the living, what we have forgotten, what we do not want to see, what overflows and troubles us.
Metaphorically and conceptually, black paste embodies not only what binds Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont to her loved ones and the cyborg plants whose portraits she creates, but also what binds the individuals represented to their own memories, their own experiences, their own existences and interdependencies. The black paste connects everything. ‘It stores the whole, the atoms that constitute the whole. It is the beginning, where we come from and also where we will return. It is the proof, the memento that no matter what we do, I have been you, you have been me and we have been this plant.’¹ Physically, on the canvas as in space, it is the cooked result of a mixture of beeswax, Dammar resin, black pigments obtained by the calcination of materials. The black paste is applied by hand around the figure in the form of plant motifs, water currents or air currents. It is thick and matte. It generates densities. On the canvas, it absorbs light - thus bodies, human and non-human, are their own source of light. The artist explains that black paste is ‘a paint for bats, for beings who see with something other than their eyes’. The black paste tells us that there are a multitude of ways to see, to remember, to feel an image, a light, an object, a body, a texture.
It is the compost by which it becomes possible for us to dream the obscure, to think beneath flesh, beneath surfaces and appearances. ‘What we believe shapes the world.’ In the exhibition space as in the painting surface, the artist sculpts the black paste with her fingers to form swampy areas, riptides, torrents, paths or even mounds. She looks for what is buried, everything that is difficult for us to say or to show. The mounds, hillocks of black paste, conceal what has been buried. Graves, buried cities, swallowed up by the earth and by time. On the canvas, Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont buries elements beneath black paste. Like tightly-closed chests, the paintings contain an obscure part, an invisible part. Starhawk, a Californian witchand ecofeminist activist, speaks of the inner power: ‘Yes, the inner power is the power of the low, the dark, the earth; the power that comes from our blood, our lives, and our passionate desire for the living body of the other.’² Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont manifests through painting this ‘passionate desire for the living body of the other’. A desire freed from binary and alienating thoughts. A desire generated by a vital impulse that leads her to a deep encounter with the other, that guides her as much towards darkness, rich in dissimulations and troubles, as towards a light, a colour, a ‘meta-surreal’ interior of the individuals whose lives she explores. So perhaps the artist manages to manifest some of the inner power of those she chooses to represent. She also speaks of the ‘fire from within’. The portraits challenge certitudes, fixities and rigidities in order, on the contrary, to present individuals in becoming, beings in movement who evolve within an ecosystem, which also occurs over a long period of time, invariably mutating and becoming an ancestral metamorphosis of the living. ‘And, little by little, extend a map. Make the rest disappear. Not to pronounce any more in order to forget. Then pronounce only what is sure and move forward by feeling with the throat to pronounce a little more.'
Text by Julie Crenn
¹ Chloë Saï Breil Dupont's quotes are taken from personal texts and conversations.
² STARHAWK. Dreaming the dark - Magic, sex and politics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982.
PRIX JEAN FRANCOIS PRAT 2021
Hidden place
We go to the hidden place
That we go to the hidden place
We go to the hidden place
We go to a hidden place
Björk – Hidden Place (2001)
Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont paints portraits.
On the canvas, she represents in oil her friends, the people she lives with now or in the past. Each work is the result of a personal relationship, of conversations over time. “We do not exist in the same way with another person, and then with another, or yet another.” * These plural relationships are part of what she is. They nourish her ideas about systems of representation, about art and the social structures (real or utopian) within which they would like to exist.
The artist, who has lived in France, in Brazil, in Italy and in Germany, appropriates the codes and techniques of an art history that is at once classical and open. She revisits Flemish art or Renaissance painters and creates temporal shifts between what has been and what is. Her technical and visual exploration can be seen as a counterpoint to the visual flux that we have been accustomed to for some time now. Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont takes the time to paint her friends bodies. The oils and the glaze enable her to “put the preciousness back” in their skin, and “sacredness” in their faces and gaze. Indeed, in her most recent works, the artist replays the gaze of the Mona Lisa – the gaze of painting pursuing our own.
“She or he who looks exists as much as she or he who is painted or paints”
Their hands hold against their chests littles blocks of images that the artist calls cassettes. These are freeze frames of films, of painting, of events. Between ex-votos and Instagram images, they constitute a memory that is partly offered for sharing. The gesture is equivocal. It holds back a form of intimacy as much as it reveals parts of it. This same gesture, of holding one’s hands against oneself, manifests a modesty, a desire to say something about oneself, about the other. The cassettes exteriors what is deep within us – ghosts, invisible things, things that are difficult to say, and perhaps easier to represent. They could do without our commentaries. They make visible all the things that appearance dissimulates. And so the portraits belong in a history as ancestral as it is of the moment – the black paste – and in which the artist searches through memory-bodies with the utmost delicacy.
*Quotations are from a phone conversation with the artist that took place on 12 March 2021.
Text by Julie Crenn
A PhD in Art history, Julie Crenn is an art critic (AICA) and an independent curator. Since 2018, she has been associated with the programming of Transpalette – Center d’Art Contemporain de Bourges. She conducts intersectional research on living things, bodies, memories and artistic activism.
