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| Matisse |
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KERA: Yves-Alain, you’ve pointed out that it’s hard for a viewer’s eye to rest for very long anywhere in a Matisse composition. Why do you think he adopted that artistic strategy? Yve-Alain Bois: Matisse once told some journalists that when he was painting a still life of oysters, he had to have new oysters opened every two or three hours. Why? Because he needed to have that special smell, that wetness… Matisse’s goal was not to represent the thing, but to represent the effect of the thing on him when he was painting it, and to create the same effect on the beholder. In order to do that, Matisse had to attack the senses in all kinds of ways. He wanted to achieve a diffusion of the beholder’s senses, a diffusion of the gaze. KERA: So how did he achieve that? Yve-Alain Bois: In different, sometimes contradictory ways. His lines, for instance. Your eye tends to follow multiple lines. With a lot of curves, your eye doesn’t know which way to go. If you present the eye with too much visual stimulation, it simply can’t concentrate. Matisse didn’t only use the technique of profusion. He used its opposite: bareness. One of his methods of dispersing the gaze of the beholder is to place key parts of the canvas at the extremities of the painting and nothing at the center. Your eye wanders without having a place to rest. What was important for him was to prevent your eye from resting in the center. Also, very early on, Matisse became skilled at creating effects with color, with contrasting colors so that your eyes simply cannot rest.
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