Fautrier l’enragé

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d’Atlantis, Musique électroacoustique et cinéma, Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, 2012.

Drawing on a text by Jean Paulhan entitled Fautrier l’enragé, Philippe Baraduc offers with this television essay an overview of the work and personality of Jean Fautrier, painter of “Art informel”. Juxtaposing canvases and images of natural elements together with an interview conducted by Jean Paulhan, Baraduc shows how Fautrier’s painting, rather than a representation of the concrete, is an attempt, at the limit of abstraction, to suggest its depth. Art informel and abstract art are paradoxically brought closer here to figurative art, in the sense that, seen through a microscope, reality can merge with the abstract, where art informel would be a trap for catching reality.

Anxious to illustrate the aesthetic remarks made in this film, whose reflection bears above all on the specificities of Jean Fautrier’s work and on the abstract character of the reality at work in his paintings, François Bayle chooses to borrow only instrumental sonorities.
Concrete sounds are therefore set aside on the occasion of this film score to make room for traditional instruments. Even so, one can speak more of an almost abstract instrumental matter, so much do the articulations, the superpositions and the playing modes recall the empiricism of concrete composition.
With this attempt to transpose the techniques of concrete composition to instrumental music, François Bayle belongs to the tendency that drove the composers of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, such as Philippe Carson and Ivo Malec, at the same period.

This information notice was co-produced with INA/GRM for the creation of the multimedia fresco – Artsonores – L’aventure électroacoustique, in the category Films produced by the Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF from 1950 to 1975.