Michel Paysant reimagines Monet's Water Lilies at Musée de l'Orangerie

PARIS.— Michel Paysant’s work is built upon contact with science: “Making art interests me, but collaborating with fields that, a priori, have nothing to do with it, different genres, is fascinating”, he confides. Which is why he developed a type of drawing based on recordings of his eye movements.

The project, titled DALY, standing for Dessiner avec les yeux (Drawing with my Eyes), is implemented with the help of an eye tracker (an oculometric procedure that highlights eye activity, the visual path, its fixation points and movements). So the eye rather than the hand becomes the tool. For the last thirty or so years, the artist has collaborated with numerous laboratories in creation of these works, including at the Louvre, the Centre Pompidou, the MUDAM in Luxembourg, the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, the Dadu Museum in Beijing, the Nouveau Musée National in Monaco and the Centre d’Art Verrier (CIAV) in Meisenthal.

Michel Paysant focuses in particular on interpretation of artistic heritage, revisi- ting art history, “looking at” works through the filter of his own creation. In 2022, he was overcome by a desire to draw Claude Monet’s Water Lilies with his eyes. Perhaps, first of all, because of the paradoxical nature of this ambition: to create immense paintings, characterised by their vastness, their absence of beginning and end, considered one of the first acts of decentralised painting in the West. All Over, where no part of the painting takes precedence over another.

The artist’s eye movements transcribe his “inner cinema”, which he provides with tangible form. Drawings on paper made with the help of a plotter, lights created from eye fixation points at the moment the artist discovers Monet’s Green Reflections panel, Paysant’s thoughts draw the work on paper and canvas, poly- morphous objects where interactions between traditional techniques and high tech redefine the role of the beholder, the hand, and the artist.

The culture of interdisciplinarity is at the heart of his imagination: “the bridges I try to imagine connect art, design, craftsmanship, technique, new technolo- gies and high tech Neither documentary nor fictional, the aim is to develop an aesthetic of dream, a vision. The digital revolution seemed to me to provide a chance to be able to connect all these fields in a common language. My English training (I’m a pure product of the Royal College of Art in London) shaped this interdisciplinary attitude. It’s the reason why I’ve evolved so freely in the hard sciences (nanotechnologies, neurosciences, etc.) and in the research projects I develop with glassmakers (in Meisenthal), ceramists and weavers (in Zimbabwe) […] An artist’s thought must go from one bank to the other. Without taboo or spe- cialisation. Art has nothing to prove. It just has to surprise us, expand the world and continue to bewilder us.” »

Michel Paysant has been exhibiting his work in museums for over thirty years, including at Centre Pompidou, Louvre Museum, Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris Museum of Decorative Arts, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, MUDAM in Luxembourg, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo, National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, MACBA in Buenos Aires, Nouveau Musée National in Monaco, National Museum in Riyadh and UCCA in Beijing, as well as at art centres including Brooklyn Bridge Space/Creative Time in New York, Mercer Union in Toronto, David Roberts Art Foundation in London, Bétonsalon in Paris, the Synagogue in Delme and FRAC Picardy in Amiens.

CURATORSHIP: Sophie Eloy, Collection Manager, in charge of the Contemporary counterpoint exhibitions at the Musée de l’Orangerie