Overseas
cultures
Pierre Lamalattie invites to imagine overseas cultures where beauty
would have all its place, where decoration would remain a practice
as simple and necessary as cooking.
In spite of their appearance of realism, these compositions are
not faithful to ethnographic reality. On the contrary, they often
mix several sources, transform the ornaments, transpose the colours,
and amalgamate them in a kind of multicoloured baroque. The artist
is not aiming at sociological and historical reality of the people
concerned. It is rather the attraction for an imaginary overseas.
It is this fascination for countries where one would dress and
wear ornaments without reserve, where the play of colours would
be spouting out, powerful, fertile, and where art would not be
ashamed of being decorative above all.
Man is a kind of hermit-crab, mingling his body with all kinds
of objects, for better and for worse. The decorative richness
of the overseas people pushes this human vocation in very diverse
paths, in an often surprising and propitious manner. Pierre Lamalattie
invites us to explore such paths, be they real or imaginary.
In the 19th century, the Orientalist painters exploring the world,
often under very difficult conditions, were authentic adventurers.
But their voyage was not only a sporting performance, it was also
and above all a quest for beauty and strangeness, a fascination
for the "East", a true thirst for images, a desire to
see, and especially, to see things which liberate from Western
moroseness, a repairing need to do good to the eyes. Popular language
has a very explicit expression: "to get an eyeful".
Orientalism draws its roots from this form of greed and voyeurism.
One senses the need to grab as many eyefuls as possible, to do
one good, and to flee. There is a kind of departure, a kind of
quest. The voyage proposed by Pierre Lamalattie in his "Faces
from elsewhere" draws from the same nostalgia.
This voyage also offers the opportunity to rediscover the importance
of small things. One thus finds in the compositions of Pierre
Lamalattie all kinds of collages, fragments of brushwood, colt
wood, seeds, minerals, stones, ceramic fragments, but also small
industrial objects ridded of their initial function: buttons,
pearls, fuses. All these things have no interest from a utilitarian
point of view. Their value as a resource is null. But, a glance
freed from all trace of utilitarianism, a glance from a distance
welcomes their expression and their existence, and opens up another
space to them. One has the impression that these small objects
have a soul; one invests them with powers, and reaches their poetry.
The world is filled with the rise of the silent things of nature.
By surrounding himself with decorative objects and capturing fragments
of the surrounding world as if they were grigris, the man builds
his own world. He lives in it. This dwelling is truly an achievement.
It unites Man and the Gods.
