Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont: Our Tongues Have the Taste of Powder

When I look upon the new paintings of Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont, I am seized by a shiver which, if I am to believe the title of the exhibition, is perhaps above all a kind of powdering. It’s one of my favorite verbs: to powder. For me it has always been synonymous with dissolution and disappearance, love and destruction. It is a term that I have always taken in a very sensual, almost erotic way. When things begin to powder, they open up, intertwine, and break through to the world in streams of particles. Powdering is an amorous emulsion, which transforms everything in its path. 

It is often remarked, and rightly so, that Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont works in the tradition of the great masters of the Renaissance, and that her portraits employ the formal vocabulary of these masters. However, from another perspective, such remarks mislead us as to the deeper meaning of her pictorial practice. And for good reason, it is not a question of the artist continuing the tradition of humanist portraiture, but rather to create the possibility of representing creatures belonging a priori to the human species in a resolutely anti-humanist manner. Where humanist portraiture sought to represent its subjects by insisting on the enlightened character of their power, Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont’s portraits seek, on the contrary, to represent the strictly non-human dimension of those she paints. For the human as instituted by humanism is less a biological fact than a title, in the honorific sense of the term: a dignity, as Pico della Mirandola wrote in his famous treatise. The archetypal humanist subject was (and in some ways still is) a powerful white man, the exceptions only proving the rule. Some centuries later, Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont offers us an alternative. By this I mean: a crack in the paradigm, a line of flight, a breath of fresh air, the promise of a darker and freer life. This is how I believe we should understand her use of non-conforming colours in the treatment of her models' complexions. Indeed, in her painting, the artist seems to seek to invent another way of being human, where the dominant dignity is finally erased in favour of a truly living life where blues, mauves, pinks and violets manage to nourish the possibility of a common existence. 

From my point of view, the powdering evoked in the title of the exhibition must be understood as a real promise of powerlessness. That said, I can’t help but feel that, behind the title of the exhibition, a more rebellious formulation is emerging: “Our tongues hate the state of power”. Our tongues, that is to say our stories, our narratives, our lived lives and our legendary existences hate the stasis of power. They prefer powdery ecstasy. This is why Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont relies on storms and volcanoes as she relies on loved ones. She knows that only the friendship of tornadoes and fire will one day allow her to pass to the other side, where tongues touch in the dark and work for the triumph of love, as shown by the arrows incapable of reaching the lovers depicted in one of the paintings in the exhibition.