PARIS.- Mennour is presenting an original dialogue between two artists: one historical, Jean Degottex (1918–1988, France), the other contemporary, Sidival Fila (born in 1962, Brazil).

At the turn of the 1980s, Jean Degottex began one of the most simplified periods of his career. After the gestural intensity of the previous decades, his painting seemed to enter a new phase of meditation. The gesture disappears, the sign withdraws, the surface becomes the support of traces, prints, scratches, as if the artist was trying to reach a zone in which only the tension of the painting remains. His interest in Eastern philosophy, the Zen emptiness, the breath (qi) fashioned a thought in which the painting gradually fades. It is the outcome of a slow process in which the artist sought a fundamental reduction. The canvas becomes a field in which the pictorial gesture only happens at its point of equilibrium: enough to produce a vibration but not enough to be called a motif. The sign is dissolved in a rhythmics that oscillates between tension and erasure. That stripped-down style brings to light an inner movement: the painting is now considered a field of energies.

The work undertaken by Sidival Fila over several decades seems to fall within the lineage of Jean Degottex, to whom the artist pays homage here with a series of works conceived in resonance. Vibrant with spirituality, Sidival Fila’s research shows an intense focus on the vibrations of the materials. Like Jean Degottex, he works with the simplest of materials, the barest, in order to reveal its latent energy. In his practice, old fabrics, raw canvases, ordinary sheets and the lining of liturgical garments are transformed with a meticulous work of stitching, creating tension and incision. Sidival Fila doesn’t paint: he sculpts the surface. The thread, the suture, the tightening become the vectors of an energy that is never expressive. The stitched surfaces, slightly opened or stratified, create minimal gaps and trace zones of folds and contacts, between shadow and light.

The closeness between Jean Degottex and Sidival Fila relates to the shared experience of meditation understood as a visual art occurrence. In their practice, both artists aspire to minimal art. Jean Degottex used to say that the emptiness was never empty, but “the place where something can happen”. Sidival Fila, from his studio in the Franciscan convent on the Palatine hill overlooking Rome’s Coliseum, finds that dynamics of the active emptiness. The fabric is not a static support: it is memory, tension, vibratory surface.