Where Id was, there I must be.

Sigmund Freud

In addition of being a diligent experimenter that applies a complex assortment of mediums (photography, video, installation, digital work), Cerj Lalonde remains above all an extraordinary painter.  In evidence, one can view his splendid multimedia presentations of the nineteen-eighties that persistently summons the primitivism-alchemy of a Beuys as much as the “black hole” of electronic images by Nam June Paik. With a sharp insertion in the pages of the influential Canadian newspaper, Le Devoir, isn’t’ it Lalonde who protests the incompetence of the mass media in presenting and evaluating paintings, to the full advantage of the “sensational” art? Isn’t he the one that insists that the fundamental role of research on actual painting, according to his beliefs, is “unique and essential for the development of the human and of his existence in this world”? (Beuys used to say that life, even at a physiological level, was impossible without art). It is

during this interval when the fundamental centrality of philosophical language in Lalonde’s work was made clear. One of the first systematic analyses of the body of his artistic work in the light of a strong speculative system is owed to Joan Altabe, critic of the Herald Tribune who sensed correctly that the artistic language of Lalonde consists so often in the indispensability of fine lines, but that his canvases compel above all a “contemplative” glimpse across a certain mystical space that recalls Rothko and Newman.

Even from his first experiments in the field of visual arts, Cerj Lalonde’s indebtedness to such artists as Frank Stella, Mondrian and Kandinsky appeared evident.  Characteristics such as geometric  backgrounds  and  lean  use  o f colorant,  from  strong  conceptual  connotations at  the

service of canvases whose urgency does not come across as an apparent alien.  In connection with his work is it just a coincidence that the same Lalonde has revealed his artistry in these words?: “Some of my paintings are very structured and orderly, so that the security and the power of limitspermit total freedom for the expression of forms and colors and of all what painting and only painting can do.”

More than anyone else, it was the critic Leo Rosshandler who, several years ago, id

entified in the research of Cerj Lalonde a coherent philosophical system that, precisely for this artist convention, demands of the spectator concentration of a speculative kind. This smacks of superior art, lacking any artifice of intellectual closure but simply traverses canvases of splendid formal construction and of exquisite and delicate coloration.  At the same time, Rosshandler also linked his research to that tradition extending from the Russian avant-garde until the post-modern era, assigning the work of Lalonde an autonomous role where abstraction becomes a bond between the deep glance of psychology and a general cast that combines intimacy and mysticism.  An irremediable dichotomy?  Not at all. First of all because glue (and guaranty) of a non-contradictory text in Lalonde is not simply the work, but the aesthetic experience and ethic that the work of art provides. The challenge is always that of inducing a “cognitive process” in which the onlookers and the artists with their respective philosophies have equal roles. Lalonde’s intellectual orientation rests upon a constant dialectic: classical method and post-modern asystematic, i.e., warmth of painting and chill of the new media, epistemology and feeling; but there is always this central theme: the obsession for “seeing” as discerner of judgment.

But the thing in itself which lies behind that which we see is not hidden; the “glimpse” is just one of the paradoxes which the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan has become attached to. This brings to mind Merleau-Ponty’s numerous writings on painting, among which one recalls Cezanne’s Doubt. “The rapport between the glimpse and that which one wishes to see is deceptive”, according to Lacan.  But the glimpse is precisely that “social process” that unites across language all the observers in the symbolic sphere.  The frustrated glimpse, if it is that which one wants “to see” is always the unachievable “other desire”. Yet, doesn’t Lacan, in Seminario XI discuss  Le Visible et l’Invisible by Merleau-Ponty and define the glimpse as “the reversal of the portrayal”? And, as for his style? The mirror. (In front of Lalonde’s paintings, I often have the sensation of confronting the mysterious wardens of the mirrors: smooth surface, epicentricity of a bidimensional plan, the monochromatic…etc.)

It is Gilles Deleuze who speaks of “style” as the fundamental requirement for the philosophical. Isn’t art itself also style? Therefore, as Lalonde knows so well, the indispensable requirement of art is philosophy.

TO SEE OR TO BE SEEN

The art of Cerj Lalonde minimizes his apparent debt to the conceptual and spatial practices of the century just terminated. It is an extraordinary body of works that embraces Barnet Newman through Frank Stella and neo-conceptual experiments. (Above all, I think of Barnet Newman’s Achiles of 1952, or more programmatically The Name of 1949 – both at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; which with ink and course brush strokes announced the inextinguishable coexistence of the painter’s body and gesture with the philosophical approach providing ample tolerances, as others have demonstrated, as well as evidence of the absence of “deictic indicators” in Western painting as proposed by the philosopher Norman Bryson). However, it is Kasimir Malevitch and that fundamental oil of dimensional mediums that is Four black and four red of 1915, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that represents the rock base of the imagery of Lalonde.  Much earlier Kadinsky emancipated his work from a sense of inferiority with musical analogies (i.e., “Improvisation”, “Compositions” …these are names of his works in the nineteen-tens); it was actually Malevitch who claimed an ontological matrix virtually across the linguistic orientation of the picture (and in the title of the work, the coincidence between “words” and content is defensibly pragmatic).

In the history of Western painting one of the more important linguistic events has been without a doubt the invention of perspective. “Perspective is the conscious awareness of the eternity of time and of the infinity of space”, Cerj Lalonde has recently written. The classical perspective, far from offering an “exact solution”,” is only one of the modes that humanity has invented in order to project the perceived world in front of himself and not a copy of that world”, according to Morleau-Ponty. A fallacious concept – if the intent is the coincidence between representation and represented, but anyway a method, which serves as a grid through which one, reads the world. That is because the discovery “of eternity and infinity” is actually within the limit of what is represented.

From this viewpoint, and renouncing the temptations for “mimicry”, what is the role of the artist? That of presenting simply the limits of the world and of men?  Can his role be anything other than the priest of the finite?

“Talking about the identity of the artist is playing with a myth”, affirms Lalonde. He was referring to Freud’s comments in his preface of The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoievsky) when he asserts, “the problem of the artist cannot be analyzed”. In this perspective one does not escape from awareness of a return to certain idealistic bunkers.  Recalling how Barnett Newman said that “the first man was an artist”, it follows that for Lalonde identity is mainly a mater of personality (with all its complex characteristics); it is more than an ontological definition across the paradisiacal and romantic reinstatement of the creator/artist “hybrid”- enter the critic (the theoretical delimiter) of art as profession in the advanced industrial society.

In Lalonde the divide between artist and spectator is melded in a perspective of “participation” in the aesthetic event, not just as a dynamic exchange (on such reciprocity the artist lays out, as per Lacan, a great part of his work), but as an essential common background. As a conceptual illustration, this common background in the Renaissance painting was the convention of perspective.

Around the corner, there is also Maciunas and the resumption of the avant-garde of ’58 and later, when Lalonde remembers how Marilyn Ferguson said: “every being is an artist”. But that is also an elucidation.  The perspective of Cerj is never that of revolt or of babbling fluxus, but that of philosophical analysis.  His art veers toward cosmogony (the aesthetic as theory of style) and could even falter if it reflects the Freudian assertion of the “non-analyzability” of creation (a process that renders futile the antique and therapeutic precept of “Know thyself!” which also is one justification for making art): but frustration will produce neither neuroses (in the sense of a non-shared language) nor a nihilistic gesture.

In short, art is the YES of all, but the Everyman of Lalonde (like the “being” of the citation by Ferguson who stands out on the horizon as a unique destiny of infinite finiteness), – it is the “philosophical man” in which nothing is more distant than ambiguous “Art is easy” by a Giuseppe Chiari. For Lalonde, if art is a pleasure, it is also a struggle because it is a process between opposites. Above all, it is the “process of knowing”.

And when Lalonde reveals that the picture appears to him like an evangelical “good tidings”, he becomes further empowered by Gnostic inspiration (if non mystical) of his research. And, above all, he uncovers an experiential facet of painting that for years gave “testimony” to the essentiality of the “verb”, which in Lalonde’s case is color and form.

Finite form is often represented by primary colors since the only path to salvation is always the grid of the archetype. And of science.

Even in the speculative phase, Lalonde has frequently revealed the fascination that people display toward Piero della Francesca and the painting of the Renaissance; but we have said it is the abstraction of the perspective in which the abstraction serves mainly to enliven it.  In the classical painting, the rules of perspective (choice of objectification with respect to the theory of subjectivity of the Gestalt) would put into the scene an image that alludes to movement. In Lalonde, it is not so much the gesture of the painting being revealed (in this he is closer to Mondrian than to Pollock), but the “gesture of intelligence” as rapport between the artist and the represented that has emanated from his power to represent.

Across these elements that the artist calls `scenario”, where is the space in which the work in front of a progressive experience and collective entity? That on which the artist works is an “infinite perspective” in which the installation in scene – emphasizing – across an experiential Zen matrix, the eternity of time and the infinity of space. This construction furnishes “pretexts” and “contexts” more than true and proper texts.  His is a nimble art, made more by silence than by presence.

With regard to the oriental painting, Ales Erjavec, citing Francois Cheng, noted about the emptiness inside a picture, “it is not an inert presence, but it is exchanging breaths that unite the visible world (the painted space) with that invisible one”.

It is noted that Lalonde is a multimedia artist, but more in the camp of the painter (It is funny that passage of his in which the definition of his work, on the pattern of some sensationalistic prose used in contemporary criticism makes him “neo-abstract and contemporary, post-modern or actual, post-neo-constructivist or organic-neo-structuralist (…), to summarize, simply painting”…) do not indicate a middle ground for his preferences, but a precise philosophical sphere, whose mission is that of  “communicating a vision” as one recites one of his vast series of works. The word “vision” is semantically rich (in French as in English) and refers either to mechanical processes of the eye and of the processes of the brain, or of the apparition beyond this world.  The vision as “object” of relation of the Gestalt, but also as an actor on the event. In Lalonde, the solution may be in this doubt: what if the artistic vision was the true “subject”?

It is not quite the case that one of the more conceptual and programmatic works by Lalonde is the photographic installation “Seeing” (or “Criticism of the Judgment”) in which a room completely painted black accommodates a myriad of eyes on the walls, peering at us like eavesdropping monitors. What is its meaning? If art is always observed, we never need to forget that true art is born from action tied to the spectator and to the work itself.  And at the moment, Lalonde presents us exactly with a complex work that is watched like this, but which, above all, from a Lacanian viewpoint, “watches us”.

This conceptual photographic installation (“Seeing”) exhibited in one of the room of the Museum of the Castello di Lupinari has been fully studied in a series of meetings arranged by Professor Suzanne Leclair at Concordia University of Montreal. She promptly placed into context the interaction, in Lalonde, between space and representation, actually finding in the dialectic between emptiness and fullness, light and dark, to see and being seen, the most profound reasoning of his artistic communication.

Still, observing the works of Lalonde the doubt remains: who really communicates the Vision? The artist? The spectator? Or the work itself?

And one of the fundamental Gordian knots of the theory of contemporary art, which has been amply dealt with by Freud as well as Jacques Lacan and, before him, Merleau-Ponty,- is the vision as occupying an ontological centrum. This conception is not consistent with that of Heidegger for whom poetry is the language of being. But the “logic of the glimpse”, perceived by Bryson, is that which “sees the representation” not like a mimicry attempt, “but in relation to its internal truth” (Erjavec). It is again Erjavec who remembers it, like Merleau-Ponty indicates: in the painting as principle route for achieving “Existence”. But philosophy is aspiration to existence; so is awareness of one’s own limit.

Can hunger for perfection be overcome by love of perfection?   Would we find ourselves speechless before the exquisite paintings of  Piero dell Francesca and would we be able to share our empathy toward this moment of astonishment with others? Do we have the capacity to come to terms with such human emotions? Perhaps we don’t know the answer and are incapable of communicating our senses to others because we are not poets. Then how can we account for that species of dreamer that persists in being astonished by the nimble poetic labor that produces such perfection? Isn’t the total consciousness and unrelenting tension of one who commits to perfection, the being responsible for creating such perfection? If that is so, one such gifted dreamer whose life has been dedicated to that captivating glimpse of the truth through striving for perfection in the creative process is Cerj Lalonde.

In the final analysis it is from here, from the perspective of the dizzying edge of the limit of man and of his irrepressible drive toward transcendence that the abstract painting of Cerj Lalonde watches the world from inside himself.  In this manner, he becomes the watch warden inside us all.