“Very big formats and closed up framings: the monkeys have great presence on the canvas, thing that can't hold them back no more than our memories. Their strong and incongrous presence stop us and invite us to a face to face without dodging the issue.

The cinema-like and freeze framings draw for the audience a path on the edge, risking a lack of comfort: like a boundary between something familiar and something unfamiliar, between the portrait and the mirror, between the inability to look away and our freedom as a viewer.

 

The size of the paintings and the very big shots on the monkey's faces establish a kind of confrontation, which reveals itself without any kind of violence, and sometimes even with an unexpected softness. Or it is the monkey that looks away and give us a profile that allows us to breath a little – we stop being watched.

 

There is something irritating in this serie of portraits, as if the painting was on the side of the liberty, of the depth and the movement, while for us, looking at them, would be instantly prisoners, trapped by the surface and the artifice.

Trapped in our limited human-like movements while the monkeys are dancing on the frame, even in their static positions.

Limited by our understanding of anthropomorphism of our interpretation, contrasted by their limitless silence.

Bound by our own words that draw boundaries in the world, filtering, separating, explaining and finally struggling to tell the complexity that painting summons.

 

Beyond this irritation, of this pebble in our shoe, the work of Philippe Hervier also give us back a natural and delicious liberty, the liberty of our entire presence to his paintings: like in a movie, we can, in front of them, extract ourselves from our down-to-earth reality and dive, without thinking more forward, in the eyes of the apes, our remoted ancestors and yet so close cousins, which make it difficult to keep distance from.”

 

 

Véronique BELOT

Introduction to Translation 

The Monkeys - Philippe HERVIER 

by Lea HERVIER BLONDEL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Véronique Belot, agosto2013