Although he is a diligent experimenter who works with a complex range of media (photography, video, installation, digital work), Cerj Lalonde remains, above all, an extraordinary painter. One need only recall his splendid multimedia installations of the nineteen-eighties, which invoked the alchemical primitivism of a Beuys as much as the “black hole” of Nam June Paik’s electronic images. Was it not Lalonde who, in a sharply worded piece in the influential Canadian newspaper Le Devoir, protested the media’s indifference to painting, to the full advantage of “sensational” art? Was it not he who insisted on the fundamental role of research into painting, precisely because of its qualities, “unique and essential to the development of the human being and of his existence in this world”? (Beuys used to say that life, even at the physiological level, is impossible without art.)

It was in this piece, among other things, that the fundamental centrality of philosophical language in Lalonde’s work became clear. One of the first systematic analyses of his body of work in the light of a strong speculative framework is owed to Joan Altabe, critic for the Herald Tribune, who rightly sensed that while Lalonde’s artistic language often rests on the essential economy of a few lines, his canvases, through a certain mystical air that recalls Rothko and Newman, always call above all for a “contemplative” gaze.

From his very first experiments in the visual arts, Cerj Lalonde’s debt to artists such as Frank Stella, Mondrian and Kandinsky was evident: geometric fields and a spare use of color, in the service of canvases with strong conceptual connotations, yet not untouched by the expressive urgency of gestural painting. It is no coincidence that Lalonde himself has described his work in these words: “Some of my paintings are very structured and orderly, so that the security and the power of limits permit total freedom for the expression of forms and colors, and of all that painting, and only painting, can do.”

More than anyone else, it was the critic Leo Rosshandler who, several years ago, identified in Cerj Lalonde’s research a coherent philosophical system — one that, precisely for this reason, demands of the viewer a speculative kind of attention. Here lies the wonder of the greatest art: no artifice, no intellectual closure, simply canvases of splendid formal construction and exquisite, delicate color. Rosshandler, while placing this research within the tradition that runs from the Russian avant-garde to the postmodern, assigned Lalonde’s work an autonomous role, one in which abstraction becomes the bond between the deep gaze of psychology and a general tone that combines intimacy and mysticism. An irreconcilable dichotomy? Not at all. First, because what binds (and guarantees) a non-contradictory text in Lalonde is not simply the work itself, but the aesthetic and ethical experience the work of art provides. The aim is always to set in motion a “cognitive process” in which the onlookers — the artist and the viewer, each with their own philosophy — play equal roles. Lalonde’s intellectual approach rests on a constant dialectic: classical method and postmodern unsystematic thought, the warmth of painting and the chill of new media, epistemology and feeling; yet always with one central theme — the obsession with “seeing” as a critique of judgment.

That what lies behind what we see is not the thing in itself, but precisely the “gaze,” is one of the paradoxes to which the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan have accustomed us. One thinks of Merleau-Ponty’s many writings on painting, among them the seminal Cézanne’s Doubt. “The relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure,” Lacan writes. Yet the gaze is precisely the “social process” that, through language, unites all observers in the symbolic sphere — a frustrated gaze, if it is true that “seeing” is always the unattainable “desire of the other.” And does not Lacan, in Seminar XI, discussing Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, define the gaze as “the reverse side of representation”? And its style? The mirror. (Before Lalonde’s paintings, I often have the sensation of facing the mysterious cleanness of mirrors: smooth surfaces, the epicentric quality of a two-dimensional plane, monochrome…)

It is Gilles Deleuze who speaks of “style” as the fundamental requirement of philosophy. Is art not also style? Therefore, as Lalonde knows so well, the fundamental requirement of art is philosophy.

TO SEE AND TO BE SEEN

Cerj Lalonde’s painting owes its most evident debt to the conceptual and spatial practices of the century just ended — that extraordinary body of works and intentions that runs from Barnett Newman to Frank Stella and the neo-conceptual experiments. (I think above all of Barnett Newman’s Achilles of 1952, or the more programmatic The Name of 1949 — both at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. — which, with ink and coarse brushstrokes, proclaimed the inextinguishable coincidence of the painter’s body and gesture with a philosophical approach, rendering rather superfluous, as others have shown, the absence of “deictic markers” in Western painting proposed by the philosopher Norman Bryson.) Yet it is Kasimir Malevich, with that seminal medium-sized oil Black Square and Red Square of 1915, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who represents the cornerstone of Lalonde’s imagery. Long before Kandinsky freed his work from a sense of inferiority toward music (“Improvisations,” “Compositions”… these were the titles of his works of the 1910s), it was Malevich who claimed an ontological foundation for painting through a linguistic approach (and in the title of that work, the coincidence between “words” and content is pointedly programmatic).

In the history of Western painting, one of the most important linguistic events was, without 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. Classical perspective, far from being an “exact solution,” “is only one of the ways humanity has invented to project the perceived world before itself, and not a copy of that world” (Merleau-Ponty). Fallacious, if the aim is a perfect match between representation and represented — but a method nonetheless, a grid through which to read the world. For it is precisely within the limit of what is represented that the discovery “of eternity and infinity” takes place.

From this viewpoint, once the temptations of “mimesis” have been renounced, what is the role of the artist? Simply to present the limits of the world and of mankind? Is the artist nothing more than a priest of the finite?

“Talking about the identity of the artist is playing with a myth,” Lalonde affirms, citing Freud’s remark, in his commentary on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, that “the problem of the artist cannot be analyzed.” Such a perspective does not shy away from the awareness of a return to certain idealist positions. Recalling Barnett Newman’s words that “the first man was an artist,” it follows that, for Lalonde, identity is mainly a matter of personality, with all its complex characteristics. More than an ontological definition through an Edenic and romantic return to the “hubris” of the creator-artist, what concerns Lalonde most is the critique (and the theoretical limit) of art as a profession in advanced industrial societies.

In Lalonde, the divide between artist and viewer is healed in a perspective of “participation” in the aesthetic event — not merely as a dynamic of exchange (on such reciprocity, by way of Lacan, the artist builds much of his work), but as an essential common ground. In Renaissance painting, for instance, that common ground was the convention of perspective.

Just around the corner, too, are Maciunas and the revival of the avant-gardes from 1958 onward, when Lalonde recalls Marilyn Ferguson’s words: “every being is an artist.” But this is also a clarification. Cerj’s perspective is never that of revolt, or of the Dada babble of a certain Fluxus, but that of philosophical analysis. His art tends toward cosmogony (aesthetics as a theory of style) and might even fail, if Freud’s assertion of the “non-analyzability” of creation holds true (a claim that would render futile the ancient, therapeutic precept “Know thyself,” itself one of the reasons for making art); yet such frustration will produce neither neurosis (in the sense of a language that cannot be shared) nor a nihilistic gesture.

In short, art indeed belongs to everyone; but Lalonde’s Everyman — like the “being” in Ferguson’s words, who stands against a horizon of one single destiny, an infinite finiteness — is a “philosophical man,” to whom nothing is more foreign than Giuseppe Chiari’s ambiguous “Art is easy.” For Lalonde, if art is a pleasure, it is also a struggle, because it is a process between opposites. Above all, it is a “process of knowing.”

And when Lalonde reveals that painting appeared to him as an evangelical “good news,” the gnoseological (if not mystical) inspiration of his research becomes all the more evident. Above all, he uncovers a practice of painting that for years has borne “witness” to the necessity of the “Word” — which, for Lalonde, is color and form.

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

Even in his speculative writing, Lalonde has repeatedly expressed the fascination that Piero della Francesca and Renaissance painting hold for him: as we have said, what stirs him most is the abstraction of perspective — perspective as abstraction. In classical painting, the rules of perspective (an arbitrary act of objectification, compared with the Gestalt theory of subjectivity) would stage an image that alludes to movement. In Lalonde, it is not so much the gesture of painting that is revealed (in this he is closer to Mondrian than to Pollock), but the “gesture of intelligence” — the relationship between the artist and the represented, which draws on his power to represent.

Through what the artist calls “scenarios” — spaces in which the work becomes a progressive and collective experience — Lalonde works toward an “infinite perspective,” in which the staging, through a practice rooted in Zen, emphasizes the eternity of time and the infinity of space, offering “pretexts” and “contexts” rather than texts in the proper sense. His is a light art, made more of silence than of presence.

Writing on Eastern painting, Aleš Erjavec, citing François Cheng, observed that the void within a painting “is not an inert presence, but is traversed by breaths that unite the visible world (the painted space) with the invisible one.”

Lalonde is known as a multimedia artist, yet his claim to a “painting-painting” (there is an amusing passage in one of his writings in which, mimicking the somewhat sensationalist prose of contemporary criticism, he defines his work as “neo-abstract and contemporary, postmodern or current, post-neo-constructivist or organic-neo-structuralist (…) in short, simply painting”) points not merely to a favored medium, but to a precise philosophical domain, whose mission is “communicating a vision,” to borrow the title of one of his large series of works. Semantically rich, the word “vision” (in French as in English) refers both to the mechanical processes of the eye and the brain’s reworking of them, and to an otherworldly apparition. Vision is the “object” of the Gestalt relation, but also an actor in the event. And in Lalonde, the question lies precisely in this doubt: what if artistic vision were the true “subject”?

It is no coincidence that one of Lalonde’s most conceptual and programmatic works is the photographic installation Seeing (or Critique of Judgment), in which a completely dark room holds a myriad of eyes on its walls, watching us like monitors listening in. What does it mean? If art is always to be observed, we must never forget that true art is born of the joint action of the viewer and the work itself. And here Lalonde offers us precisely a complex work — one that is indeed to be looked at, but which, above all, from a Lacanian standpoint, “looks at us.”

This photographic installation, recently exhibited in one of the rooms of the museum of the Castello di Lupinari, was studied at length in a series of meetings organized by Professor Suzanne Leclair at Concordia University in Montreal. She immediately linked the interplay, in Lalonde, between space and representation, finding in the dialectic of emptiness and fullness, light and dark, seeing and being seen, the deepest reasons for his artistic communication.

Still, before Lalonde’s works the doubt remains: who truly communicates the Vision? The artist? The viewer? Or the work itself?

One of the fundamental knots of contemporary art theory (and not only of art theory) is the question of the subject, amply addressed by Freud and by Jacques Lacan and, before him, by Merleau-Ponty — for whom, unlike Heidegger, for whom poetry is the language of being, it is sight that holds an ontological centrality. But the “logic of the gaze” (Bryson) is the one that “sees representation” not as a mimetic attempt, “but in relation to its inner truth” (Erjavec). It is Erjavec, again, who reminds us that Merleau-Ponty points to painting as the principal path toward Being. Yet philosophy is an aspiration to Being — and also an awareness of one’s own limits.

If only the envy of perfection could be overcome by the love of perfection! Then we would not stand speechless and resentful before the beauty of Piero della Francesca’s paintings; we would be able to voice our wonder and — our eyes cleared by tears — to tell of our emotions (an old-fashioned word, perhaps, but a perfectly fitting one). We “would be able to,” but we are not, because not all of us are poets. Not all of us, fortunately. For there is also a breed of dreamers who persist in being astonished by the lightness of perfection, by the poetry of the process that leads to it — perfection being nothing other than the perfect awareness that the imperfect striving toward the perfect is itself perfection. One of these dreamers, who has devoted a life to that enchanted gaze upon the truth of things, is Cerj Lalonde.

In the final analysis, it is from here — from the dizzying edge of human limits and from man’s indomitable striving for transcendence — that Cerj Lalonde’s abstract painting looks at the world and into itself. And in so doing, it “looks” into all of us.