| INTERVIEW with PERSPEKTIVE MAGAZINE "An ABC of Avant-Gardism" ART REVIEWS PAINTINGS-OBRAZY 18 October-15 November, 2002, Galerie Gambit, Prague The suggestion, the promise of a narrative seems implicit in Armand's work. This narrative drive remains, however, a potentiality never completely realised or fulfilled. The sense that each painting is about something specific, about something meaningful, is a frustration, it seems purposefully turned by the artist. As though each piece were a test of memory, a referential work out, a game. This is played out, played at, most obviously in the use of text and found images, the dismembered signifiers of the everyday. Uncannily familiar faces with blacked out eyes reminiscent of crime scene news reels address the viewer with an eternally mitigated gaze. Fragments of headline banners, advertisements, other texts of indeterminate origin shout incomprehensible messages. Circular paint tin lids interrupt the planar trajectories of the grid-like surfaces. The function of those elements has been frustrated, or more correctly exceeded. If they have a function now it is to no longer be what they were, it is to destabilise the organising principles of their former lives and simultaneously their current manifestation as compositional components. Retaining somehow both the signifying drive of their origin and the distress of their transformation they become the conductors of a short circuited narrative. These conductors vie for attention within an ebullient field of colour and texture, interrupting, pulling the focus, cutting it adrift again. The result is a series of overlapping and sometimes contradictory references that nonetheless travel with speed and purpose towards ... but what? The feeling is that if enough of these works were produced eventually the effort would culminate in an end--but no such handy dialectic is possible and the work goes on-- frenetically--energetically--endlessly variable, maintaining a constant tension between colour field and a loading of signification. The surface is fraught with layering, with emerging, with covering over. The gestural blasts of red and blue, of yellow are endangered, ruptured and at the same time balanced and extended by the conflict between the materiality of text, image, its semantic push, its insistence on being 'read' and its presence as a series of micro-fields within the larger field of the frame. And then there is the inevitable work of contextualising this body of work in terms of the ironic (dis)engagement of it's reference to Dada, collage, concrete poetry, abstract expressionism coupled with a certain postmodernist willingness to both appropriate these tropes and then refuse to resolve them. In the end the threat of total disintegration, the discomfort of an unrealised but suggested order is one of the most pleasurable aspects of the work as it enacts a dramatic tightrope walk between the muscular tension of expressionism and the erudite intellectualism of high modernism. --Nicole Tomlinson Known for his mixed style of large format graffiti art and lo-fi geometric abstraction, Armand is one of the emerging talents of the 21st century Prague "renaissance." The cross-cultural inflections of Armand's painting, informed by time spent in New York, Mexico, Sydney, Marrakech, bring a strongly original synthesis to the Prague art scene. Armand's first solo show in Prague, in 1999, took place in an industrial space in the city's central downtown area. A large converted basement, "Galerie Artnatur" was a short-lived venue for Prague's young multi-ethnic art underground, including work by emerging sculptors, fashion designers and an installation by the experimental Pazvuky Noise Project. Combining material taken directly from the streets, newspaper headlines, verbal/visual ephemera and bold coloration, Armand's art speaks to the immediacy and vitality of the new urban painting. The counter-point of gesture and abstraction marks a positive development from tendencies in neo-expressionsit art. ... Armand's latest show at Galerie Gambit demonstrates the artist's ongoing engagement with formal experiment and stylistic confrontation. The work itself is teeming with energies and potentialities, which even in the most "controlled" pieces seem to be on the verge of breaking through the picture plane. The boldness of Armand's work makes him one of a handful of significant artists to have emerged from the often-discussed, frenetic Prague "expat" scene of the 1990s. --Simone Ghan BOOK REVIEWS POETRY Armand keeps it to the skin, 'obstinately full of holes,' which answers back to the question of whether things suddenly become simple. They don't. --Daniel M. Nester, La Petite Zine precise language succinctly expressing sophisticated ideas--one can tell he enjoys the act of creating, not just the finished product of the poem. --Edward Taylor, The Plaza cool ... postmodern --Kevin Hart, The Sydney Morning Herald scrapes away at language to form strange, new forms --David McCooey, The Age armand is the international conduit for much of the dialogue that’s developing today. he is an internationalist, an innovator … he’s genre busting & on an “open” passport --John Kinsella, The Sydney Morning Herald SEANCES "Armand pursues the complex challenges language poses and his own language is luminous and original, both in structure and in poetic form ... The poems in this collection are sparse in style and written with great expertise. Many rank among the best work written anywhere ... a superb collection." --John Millett, Poetry Australia "There is something glittering in this poetry, there are accurate and sometimes surprising images and intensive feelings: this is a very frank poetry." --Miroslav Holub Louis Armand seeks to create a different kind of poetry. A voice that is both immediate and reflective, vital and residual. His is a poetry of extraction and distillation that merges myth and presence, that is elegiac and celebratory, ironic and sincere. The contradictions are there, the paradoxes are established, and the lyric intertwines with rhetoric. There is also a determined intelligence steering a dark passion. It is confronting work in subject matter and technique. Seances is an unusual book. I've read nothing like it before. It takes risks. And this is exciting and necessary. --John Kinsella LAND PARTITION Armand's ideal poet controls not primarily with language's rhythmic music, but with how words collide and warp upon themselves ... --Ethan Paquin, The Boston Review The language of 'internally fissured realities' ... is dense, sound-driven, and erudite. The territory being mined is somewhere between language and geography, but there is a stubborn (and tenaciously coherent) essay on the modern here, particularly modern art. The equally tenacious reader will be rewarded by a sober sensibility. --Andrei Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse truly remarkable poems ... Land Partition is a book for these and any other times, a monograph in a way for those incapable of speaking to be heard and felt. --Chris Mansel, The Muse Apprentice Guild THE GARDEN Louis Armand's The Garden, exemplifies more bold trends in the internationalization of Australian literature. Written in an experimental form borrowing from the French recit as practiced by the likes of Maurice Blanchot, this work consists of a cascade of unpunctuated disorienting prose drifting between subject and object, traversing spatial and temporal warpings as well as boundaries of imagination and reality. At times, the flow momentarily twists into interjections seemingly reflecting upon its own possibility, which: functions in weightlessness against a vertical backdrop where everything is in suspense a cliff face echoing between lines of noise on the margins of a sea traversed by an emergence of meaning which is perhaps a mere surface effect concealing the abyss of the seduction of language a recit of the wave's journey as it draws ever over to the receding shoreline ... --Sebastian Gurciullo, Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique "An idea began to form of her body as a hive of wounds that somehow pre-existed an implement a secret mutilation from within." She is everywhere here, and yet always she is not quite. The text is always too early or too late to hear. The more it chases her the more she slips the line of its noose. Text working a different time from what it desires. "I opened my mouth and a stone fell out." This is a text haunted by feeling. It deals in abstract emotions, delicately. "Fragments of lost intimacies." There's a practice, an ascetic aesthetic, for moving toward feeling in the pure form of its impurity. "But to experience oneself as cut off from others is also to hold open the possibility of transcending this isolation entering into all of those lives experiencing them like a mirror in which no division of time or space prevails." You sense it when you think you can't. --McKenzie Wark, Saline Louis Armand's "The Garden" is a single text, presented as prose, but definitely "poet's prose" (to borrow a term from the US critic Stephen Fredman used for the kind of hybrid poetry / prose work of Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley and William Carlos Williams). What Armand presents us with here is a poetic novella produced as a single unpunctuated sentence; but a disjunctive one, where the viewpoint of the narrative switches fluidly between two principle characters: an unnamed man and a woman called simply "m". There is another subjectivity, a writing "presence" which could be Armand, could be an extension of the male character (or both?). The fluidity covers time as well, we keep looping back to the same few important scenes, glimpsed in different ways from each perspective. One thing is apparent -- somehow somebody has died, and it becomes clear that it is "m". The atmosphere of "The Garden" reminds me a lot of the work of the French fiction writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot - sparsely described interiors, characters who remain effectively faceless, an atmosphere of cold yet sometimes desperate alienation. It's an utterly European Modernism, rather than the American-influenced modes we mostly receive -- but then Armand lives in Prague. The writer-figure interests me: his own consciousness seems to flow out exhausting itself in a stream of words a literal death sentence & and what if it goes on write until you can't stand it any more then give it up if you don't want to give up go on until you can't stand it any more This pinpoints a kind of obsessive drive in the writing which becomes particularly extreme towards the end of the book when the male character is clearly trying to come to terms with (the manner of) m's protracted demise and things get a little too surreal, a little too gratuitously violent. At that point you almost lose the really exciting aspect of the poem, which is just this shifting between narrative aspects and subjectivities, a kind of stream-of-consciousnesses. --Keith Jebb (From POETRY REVIEW "Full Circle" Volume 92 No. 1 Spring 2002 Extracted from "I AM FROM LANGUAGE") INEXORABLE WEATHER Louis Armand's poetry is fiercely, delectably experimental--a typical Armand poem contains its own analysis or alternative version--but his work is never less than delighting in its wrestle with language, and formal in its drive and strategy. He is very much at the heart of a new internationalist poetic--for poetry that synthesises experimental and formal verse. --David Morley a poetry filled with guest appearances by the languages we normally delegate authority to; which knows more than all of them put together. --Rod Mengham Louis Armand is a landscape poet with a difference. His landscapes are replete with 'anti-constructs' ... He marks "the remoteness between signifier & land-/scape," rather than its conventional conflation. Armand ... knows the "fundamental questions" are those of locality; he poses them with intellectual acuity, integrity, and in singular language(s) that assert pluralism and always refuse the "seductions of amnesia. --Susan M. Schultz |
 |
| louis armand reviews, interviews & commentary |