Interview with Norbert Engel (part 2)

You did not stop at this first stage because of what it is agreed to call the figurative you are spent in the abstract, in paintings whose particularity is always the great presence of the colors that catch the flight. spectator. Why this cape in your painting?

Ah, you also talk about cape! And luckily you do not talk about a change of course 🙂 because for me there is no figurative or abstract dilemma. what I’m trying to represent what I think is essential in what I see or feel it is the “for what” in other words. I paint in a way that I hope will have an impact on the viewer. Sometimes I want to do figurative sometimes abstracting to the maximum. the abstracting can sometimes be a simplification of the forms, a deletion of a maximum of details which does not seem essential to me, or sometimes completely removing the forms by using only the color. the abstract at home is almost always part of nature (what I see, what I feel, what I am) unlike constructivists or Mondrian for example, who create a reality according to precisely defined relationships by the artist and who have no external object. “Why I paint” could perhaps be defined by an inner necessity coupled with an external necessity. the inner necessity is a hidden energy that reveals itself in a random way and that is expressed by spots. Or the spots are shapes that fall from the sky and I just need to color them rather than inventing them. When I do abstract the random is important with respect to the lines. It’s especially for colors that my choices are important. One could say that the lines or shapes fall from the sky or my unconscious and the colors rise from the sea or the earth, so more of my will and this union is born a creation.

So the abstract or figurative question is a false problem. The real challenge is to succeed in doing a work as Bazaine said “who is incarnate”: “That the sensation is embodied in an immediately recognizable reality or that it is embodied in an equivalent reality, there is no between these two processes of creation, of difference of nature, or even of degree. The destiny of the world is not played between the figurative or the abstract, but between the incarnate and the non-incarnate, which is very different. “The incarnate is that relationship of contact between the outer and inner world, while disembodied art qualifies the art that has lost all contact. “In this posture of incarnation vis-à-vis the world and permeability, the forms that we recognize, and are therefore in us. It is not nature that we recognize, but a sensation, but ourselves. ” I totally adhere to this idea, joining in this way all the painters with whom I feel in touch: Matisse, de Staël, Bazaine, and all the American abstract expressionists up to the painters of Pop Art. In fact, all art is abstract to the extent that it is not nature, but a contraction of nature. Every artistic creation is a creation by an inner world that encompasses the outside world. Creation or abstraction is a kind of empathy, an immersion in the world to retain only recognizable forms.