Ein isoliertes Ich gibt es ebenso wenig als ein isoliertes Ding. Ding und Ich sind provisorische Fiktionen gleicher Art.

Ernst Mach, Erkenntnis und Irrtum, 1905

1.

There is neither interior nor exterior, only crumpled matter. Apparently unconnected to anything. Suspended in a blindingly white void. Without any explanatory surroundings. Without a thread of Ariadne. Without any prop or stay. Poised in thin air. It does not exist in reality, but is purely emblematic. In its ontological non-existence and provisional fiction, it gives rise to construction. Artificium, artful, in the sense that it is full of art.

The fabrics display fine and sharp, flat and raised fault lines. The seemingly aleatory but rhythmic structure of their mass pushes the painted composition to the very limit of abstraction. High and low, up and down, left and right: it takes the eye a while to trace them. Amazement, admiration for the naturalistic precision of their rendition. It is not easy to find a degree of regularity in the play of folds and creases. Its dynamic follows solipsistic rules, a secret logic. Its momentum clears a path, untroubled by correspondences or concordances, harmony or mirroring.

Diffused lighting reveals bas-reliefs in the texture of the textile. The quick eye cannot pick out any geometric figures or volumes. Not from any angle does one perceive a logical (or psychological) distribution of the suggested volumes. They remain compact and continue to make up a single mass.

The style of Caroline Chariot-Dayez could be called sculptural. It has the subtly luminous colour bias of glowing embers; a refined chromaticism.

2.

Different languages and jargons make different distinctions between various types of folds in fabric, such as pleats, tucks, creases, and wrinkles. Of course, the different meanings of these words are stuck to one another by the thinness of their difference. Still, most people will agree on one distinction, namely, the difference between unintentional creases and wrinkles, which are considered the results of natural transitions that create irregular waves in fabrics, and the category of pressed creases, pleats, and tucks, which are the products of an imposed order. The former are caused by an organic fault; the latter are created, through construction and pressure. Yet is the distinction so clear-cut?

When Caroline paints a crumpled smock, is she merely following the tortuous twists and turns of the material, or is she the one who shapes the spontaneous forms that present themselves? The viewer of her paintings will probably never probe the depth of the convolutions of her philosophically disposed painter’s mind. This much is certain: the painter wants to appropriate, with her sculptural approach, the volume of the thing, out of a mysterious Wahlverwantschaft between the fold and her self. Clusters of bent and angular lines make for large-hearted modelling, that convincingly suggests the hollows and bulges of the folds in the draped material.

Caroline makes the space occupied by her subject more important than the subject itself. Does not every fold refer to volume? Its very essence is limited, unoccupied, and therefore empty space. The fold may appear uninhabited, but wear invariably creeps in. That is why it serves as a refuge for ordinariness, a home to dust, a repository for lint. These other materials lodge in the recesses, cunningly taking advantage of these cavities in the surface.

Thus, the fold – movement in the advance of the surface – shows up the imperfection of superficiality. As a refuge for perception and a clump of events, it offers the first key to depth.

Folds point to the vicissitudes of life, the incompleteness of the world. Because of its specific dissipative structure, the fold shrouds itself in dark experiences. It is bowed down with unpredictability and lack of teleology. The embedment of its form does not follow any firm intention or goal. Both stopping place and progress, the fold interrupts the flow of things: in form and appearance, it bears the marks of a movement past.

3.

The painter without objects has made the fold into her playground. In the golden age of Caroline’s ancestors, the Flemish Primitives (who preferred to paint on panels, just like she does), a detailed rendering of elegantly draped folds was considered the absolute height of majestic and warm illusionism. In Robert Campin’s Salting Madonna (London, National Gallery), two thirds of the panel is taken up by the sumptuously flaring folds of the robe of the breastfeeding Virgin. In St Luke Drawing a Portrait of the Virgin Mary (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), Rogier van der Weyden uses folds to draw attention to the contrast between the figure of the artist and that of his model. The folds in St Luke’s red robe fall in a masculine and regular pattern. But over the Virgin’s golden dress billows a dark-blue coat in a perplexing maze of folds going in every direction. Besides the Virgin’s majestic wine-red robe in his Madonna with Canon van der Paele (Bruges, Groeningemuseum), Jan van Eyck paints vicious creases in the white surplice worn by the stocky canon. In Gerard David’s A Rest During the Flight to Egypt (Washington, National Gallery of Art); the Virgin’s sky-blue coat will not stop meandering in fanning folds over the stone wall on which the Virgin and Child are resting a while and enjoying some grapes.

In art, illusionism presupposes a tacit cooperation between artifex and spectator. The artist provides his painting with information, offering the viewer an occasion to include fictional spatiality in his act of looking. Because of the two-dimensionality of his art, the painter is always doomed to accord the third dimension a fictitious presence. But only the specific illusionist succeeds in making the necessarily imaginary space of his painting into a compelling illusion, and leading the spectator astray, even if only for a moment.

Painting that is about illusionism and trompe l’oeil devises strategies that make the spectator doubt what he is seeing: the thing itself, or its representation? The occasionally vertiginous deception both draws him into the painting and makes him pull away from the convention. Such paintings refute the perception of common sense. They confront the perceiver with a look-alike of the painted reality that comes forward out of the painting in order to join the spectator’s space. Caroline’s reality-in-paint aspires to a real presence, achieved partly by means of a sophisticated chiaroscuro. Not satisfied with the ordinary game of seduction, she wants to make what she shows into an element of the world in which the spectator finds himself while looking. Her felicitous persistence wants to dissolve the Cartesian problem of the bridge between consciousness and res extensa, the outside world, by painterly means. As a result, one gets the impression, from time to time, of looking at a portrait, except that the sitter, in this instance, has been replaced by his or her overall or shirt. Their contents gone, they have also been robbed of psychology. The contours of the person who might have sat for the portrait replace him, or her, in effigy. The effigy represents the ‘fugitive’ but real person, just like the image of Jesus Christ on a devotional picture or the Buddha’s features on a thangka. Seen in this light, Caroline’s oeuvre can be called symbolic painting, not to be confused, of course, with symbolist art.

4.

Everything is design. Whereas the Flemish Primitives were enamoured of the image in the image, Caroline paints the image without an image. Her optical destruction of the contents of the representation implies another, humbler perception of the white surface on which colours have been traced with a muted intensity. Unlike Petrus Christus, who painted a life-sized fly as if sitting on the frame of his Portrait of a Carthusian (New York, Metropolitan Museum) in a famous example of trompe l’oeil, Caroline has no need for spectacular tricks to reinforce the living reality of the model in the mental space of the viewer and thereby make the communication between model and viewer more intimate. The tiny fly added by Petrus Christus is an element that jumps out of the picture and unexpectedly appears outside the limits of the actual representation. There are no such anomalies in Caroline’s paintings, though that is not to say that her pictures do not penetrate into the viewer’s space.

Neither is colour a means of overwhelming the spectator. Rather, the painter uses it more as an insidious persuader for drawing the viewer into her world of folds. The main quality of her palette is a sculptural one. It has the occasionally porcelain clarity of a kind of grisaille, but on closer inspection, the scale of grey tones turns out to be extremely rich in compositional ideas – circular, rigidly vertical, and rectangular.

An almost monastic austerity with stylised, sharply cut forms – Caroline wields the brush as if it were a burin – and the lack of narrative contents: both these characteristics not only make for astoundingly exact modelling, but also for an optical, luminous transparency. The eye travels swiftly from darkness to light thanks to sophisticated halftones, which enable the painter to modulate the interspatial relations with such nuance that she achieves her enchanting suggestion of depth.

That way, Caroline makes ingenious use of the illusionist techniques that were perfected and passed on for centuries in the arts of book illumination and painting in oils.

5.

In L’Echelle de Jacob, a rope of knotted, twisted sheets or contorted painting overalls – fabric torsos – cuts straight across the middle of the painting, dividing it into almost equal halves. In their verticality, these torsions represent connection as much as separation. Indeed, they connect the world above the painting with the one below. Both worlds remain invisible. The viewer has to content himself with the joint, the connection piece: the elevated torsion, the super-fold, which forms an axis mundi or Tree of the World, pointing in both directions to the transcendental. Although the axis revolves in apparent autoformation, it certainly does not do so as a causa sui. It is a sign of time, necessarily incomplete in unfolding its un-unfoldedness. This torque stands erect like a man in the flesh, a proud but inadequate piece of rag because unfinished, fundamentally unaware of the depth of his roots and the flight of his thoughts, pure presence and simultaneity – but in its torsion, also transient despite his ostensible immobility.

L’Echelle de Jacob forms the transition between horizon and horizon, creation and apocalypse, way and wedge. The Jacob’s Ladder shows a line of tension with a double reach, both up and down. The unpainted parts it connects are equally determining for the painting as a whole.

Of course, knotted sheets, overalls, or coats also refer to escape from (biblical) prison, the vale of tears after being ejected from the Garden of Eden. Robert Bresson made a prototypal film of such a road to salvation. In his Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956), Bresson reaches ‘une émotion pure de toute facilité, une émotion spécifique, créé par les seules vertus de l’image,’ to use a phrase of François Truffaut (1956) that is perfectly applicable to L’Echelle de Jacob. In one simple image that evokes both the shackles and the salvation of the human condition, Caroline summarises an entire library on soteriology.

In addition, the strong cohesion between pieces of material that are insignificant in themselves evokes the idea of ‘co-dependent origination’ (pratityasamatpada), a key concept in Buddhist metaphysics. Everything that exists has a cause, which has an effect, which in its turn becomes the cause of a new effect, etc.: Samsara or the Wheel of Life. When things and events originate co-dependently, they are no more than conditional and possess no independence. The nature of perceptible reality – the paint-smeared overall – is relative. It exists only in relation to the paint, the painter, and her activities. Dependent co-origination rules relative being. The objective, intrinsic reality of the self and of the thing – the isoliertes Ich and Ding from the Mach quotation introducing this essay – belong to the order of delusions.  The characteristic absence of independence leads to the deep truth that all phenomena, in the end, are empty, in suspendo, devoid not of meaning, but of autonomous being. The truth of the emptiness of everything that exists must not be materialised or reified in its turn: reification would makes emptiness itself another metaphysical delusion.

Emptiness merely means that the world does not consist of the self and things, but of all their possible relations and interconnections. In the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who advised getting rid of the (Jacob’s) ladder once it had served its purpose: ‘The World is the totality of facts, not of things’ (Tractatus, 1918). According to Buddhist metaphysics, insight into the true nature of the human condition is a condition of escape from the cycle of cause and effect.

'Die Lösung des Rätsels des Lebens in Raum und Zeit liegt Ausserhalb von Raum und Zeit' (Wittgenstein, ibid.).

6.

Does the climber of the Jacob’s ladder ever reach the top? Will Caroline ever be able to iron out the creases?

Both spontaneous creases and pressed folds, both their elegant spatiality and their crumpled irregularities symbolise the ambiguity of the human condition. The fold as the tentative locomotion of space, as a stumbling line that mends itself by lifting itself up from its flatness for a while, offers things a safe haven and people, a pubic mound. A place where a sign can take cover, or a phallus can burrow. Both moments of the fold, temporary disappearance and momentary appearance, symbolise the movement of the line/phallus in the fold/vulva; In Buddhist terms, the union of emptiness and method; in Taoist terms, the complementariness of yin and yang.

The bare white background on which Caroline applies her autumn colours and other faded shades contributes to the realisation that the painter makes a practice of deepening the philosophical inclination in her way of life. Painting seems to be a spiritual exercise for her. The thematic monotony with its specific variations in the incidence of light and the modelling elevates her paintings into contemporary Andachtsbilder: aids to contemplation, meditations on life and death to be repeated over and over. Now the meditator is offered empty shells, then again a waterfall of folds; sometimes the subject seems to be crumpled paper, at others, ghostly apparitions and anthropomorphic frames; often a grubby but animated painting overall without a body; occasionally, a coat full of creases or a suit that has divested itself of its actor.

Not the physical solidity of things, and less their mystery than their transformation into metaphors for space, light, and time, is what turns Caroline’s images into symbols of decay and death, illustrations of vita brevis, ars longa. Painted traces make a deeper mark on history than the ephemeral appearance of their maker. Furthermore, they are symbols of the intense power of the mind, which is able to elevate dead matter into symbols of spiritual life. Because her works show nothing but crumpled pieces of fabric, the viewer realises that the painter is urging for the rehabilitation of matter, of material, even in its most lowly manifestation of a dirty overall. Just like the oeuvre of Giorgio Morandi, Caroline’s art runs counter to people’s customary indifference to simple utensils and objects. Both point to the mutuality of observer and observed, to the intimate connection between the painter and the painting. With her roving eye for the simple and the unloved, Caroline Chariot-Dayez presents us her highly personal interpretation of such age-old themes as the still life and vanitas