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  • Place-Presence
  • Thierry Tian-Sio-Po (bio)

In this recent work, which carries on from the previous series on landscape in 2003 and 2004, I realized that the question of the presence of place was becoming important—a presence that excludes all temporality.

Approaching the question in the best way can become an objective in itself. It seems that it does not depend solely on the order of the visible, because our memory disturbs it, and the common (synthetic) gaze or marginal vision can be enough to sense it. As a result, the real, detailed vision of painting is perhaps not necessary. Here prevails the idea of an ecology that is closely preoccupied with the networks of relation in pictorial matter. This stands in place of a distanced vision of painting and is a kind of “pictorial organic” that would succeed in bringing back, in transporting, the presence of place.

Running always running after who knows what, something new that is already there right next to you that looks at you and speaks to you in various languages, a modernity already made long ago (to be born into modernity), which brought before your time a work of art present in movement, a theater already there, a tale retold continually, the place-presences are antiplaces of the perpetual shedding of surfaces that transgress and practice detour, to reinstate them requires the gaze of the nomad; they are not idealized but mobile, fed by the history of histories and nonhistories, the thing is to create work out of aesthetics that have already been pronounced.

In my old paintings I referred to two key characters from the bestiary of the Creole folk tale: “Konpè Krapo” and “Konpè Lapin.” I worked as a kind of storyteller. Today, I am realizing that the language of the Creole folk tale is calling me again, and is working its way into my work as a painter. The principles of superimposing, of accumulation and passage, seem [End Page 93] guided more by the literary mode of the Creole folk tale than by the visual art problematic, even if it remains present.

A style of painting that speaks rather than one that shows. A way of painting to be listened to, as one would listen to memories of various nomadic voices brushing up against each other.


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Pures paysages n°4 (Pure Landscapes, no. 4), 2006. Acrylic, charcoal, sand, metal, and varnish on cloth, 150 x 150 cm. Artist’s collection.

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Pures paysages n°3 (Pure Landscapes, no. 3), 2006. Acrylic, charcoal, sand, and glue on cloth, 150 x 250 cm. Artist’s collection.

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Lieux-présences (Place-Presences), 2006. Acrylic, charcoal, sand, metal, wood, and varnish on cloth, 181 x 203 x 20 cm. Artist’s collection.

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Contraintes corporelles n°1 (Bodily Constraints, no. 1), 2006. Acrylic, charcoal, sand, and metal, 181 x 216 cm. Artist’s collection.

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Nuevo barroco (New Baroque), 2006. Acrylic, charcoal, glue cement, metal, wax, and varnish, 150 x 219 cm. Artist’s collection.

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Paysages revers n°1 (Reverse Landscapes, no. 1), 2006. Acrylic, charcoal, and metal on cloth, 218 x 300 cm. Artist’s collection.

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Thierry Tian-Sio-Po

Thierry Tian-Sio-Po was born in Saint-Laurent du Maroni in Guyane and studied fine arts in France and in Martinique. Since his first exhibition in Cayenne (1984), he has exhibited in Martinique, Cuba, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Aruba, Curaçao, France, and the United States. Some of his most recent exhibitions include, “Lieux-présences,” Cayenne (2006); “Latitudes—Terres d’Amazonie,” Paris (2006): “Latitudes—Terre de Guyane,” Cayenne (2006): and “Kréyol Factory,” Paris (2009). He lives and works in Guyane.

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