Xavier Drong, the word on the tongue

With respect to Xavier Drong’s work a single word cannot be found to define it. Figurative? But what is the unknown language that shapes these figures so present, but that we cannot, with any certainty, recognize? Abstract? These paintings clearly have their source in post-War American abstract painting, to which they owe not only the large formats, the immediate quality of the painted image, but even the da prima technique (which does not prevent pentimento but treats it as such) on cotton canvasses, which Morris Louis and Frankenthaler sung the praises of following Pollock. Biomorphic? Certainly, and in the primary sense of the term, since Xavier Drong’s drawing finds its initial source in ancient works on anatomy that, with their illustrations of larynxes and throats, give shape to the streaks of his paint. But his images in suspense are primarily biomorphic as was the case for a branch of American painting that was then coming into its own, De Kooning to begin with: body fragments arbitrarily dissected and henceforth functionless but drawing from their specific origin a singular charge that excludes any gratuitousness in the drawing. Might we say naturalist then? Except that Xavier Drong’s painting is first of all the response of a painter to the painters who preceded him. Those already mentioned of course but just as well Francis Bacon shaping the image with colored fields and using the contrast between the bare canvas and the refined nuances of color or above all Picasso, whose extraordinary Baiser, fascinating and repulsive, no less a bite than a caress, is indisputably at the origin of these cascades of angles that lately have come to tear open the undulating suavity of the usual forms of his canvasses.

And yet there is nothing in Xavier Drong’s work suggesting the pursuit of a “cultivated painting” — the early forgotten avatar of post-modern painting: the need for reassuring citations. It is in the very course of the painting itself that these encounters are made. Thus, for example, the long horizontal rhythms that musically cross the canvasses , so close in their conception to the ideas of Clement Greenberg on the “all-over”, owe less to a preoccupation with modernist orthodoxy than they do to the painter’s need to find a new respiration after a first series of works founded on verticality and the piling up of forms.

There was much expounding, following the architectural concept of post-modernism, about what a post-modern painting might be. Often it offered the occasion for a sort of curiosity shop into which citations (and very often more or less conscious restatements) drawn from all sources might enter to legitimize the impuissance of the painter to produce a new image. Perhaps it would have been better to take the term postmodern as the occasion to reconcile in one original hybrid these two apparently irreconcilable contraries of modern art in the XXth century: figuration and abstraction. This is precisely what we find implemented today in Xavier Drong’s work.

© Daniel Abadie, 2004

translated by Thelma Sowley