Jean-Louis Houël

When viewing Jean-Louis Houel’s catalogue the theme of irregularity often comes to mind. Think of reflections in water tainted by oil. Consider the tacit knowledge which forms any self-organizing queue. Or imagine the dissonance one feels upon visualizing aural landscape as wave forms on a monitor. Houel doesn’t paint pictorial replicas of these occurrences, but rather he builds his canvases based upon analogous abstractions. As there is no perfectly straight queue, oil in water plays chaos with the color spectrum, and as isolated sound waves exist only in laboratory-like situations, so too in the work of Houel there seems to be no metaphorical center for the compositions apart from the artist´s process of mark making. Houel develops vocabularies founded in dissonance, eruptions, and self-contradiction, and all of his efforts appear to spring from a deep concern for the painted canvas. With planar forms sliding around, folding into themselves, and exploding into higher orders of composition, Houel’s work is a metaphor for the contemporary world of surfaces and incorporealities. These paintings are severe, but also they are severely whimsical. “White is sexy”, as one of his titles suggests. Though in actuality Houel pushes the composition of the canvas through his use of color. Where forms are most distinguishable color explodes theatrically, announcing the presence of the painted gesture, and by extension exposing the hand of the artist. Our experience of Houel´s paintings is organized by these pulsations of color, these eruptions of form, and by a certain tension brought on by his play between compositional juxtaposition and integration of forms. His subjects are flatness, the planed-for-accident, wave cycles, tonal adjustments, and protrusion. One registers Houel as painter, thinker, and ironist who is free in his practice, and who considers painting as an open expression and extension of life’s processes.

Brian Ireland
Scénographe/Scenic Design
New York