Tanguy Tolila

Tanguy Tolila has devoted himself to painting for thirty years. During these last years, while continuing to work on canvas, he paints or draws on paper that he recovers, old music scores with notations that run on staves, whites, quarter notes, rounds, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, sighs, half-sighs, geography, or staff maps folded with meticulousness and often pasted on canvas, old dressmakers' patterns with their elegant ornamental motifs.

            Tanguy Tolila relies on their textures, their folds, their details, all different, to paint shapes and draw lines; to make them play with each other.

            More or less tight, more or less marked, the folds of the paper serve as a support and organize his intervention. He delimits soberly colored surfaces with the help of a juice or, more exactly, of juices because one distinguishes that he operates by successive passages, by addition, by superimposition of pictorial layers, some reinforce, others attenuate, extinguish the ardor of a tonality. These juices play on clear camaieu with subtle colorations, extinguished, earthy, opalescent, muddy nuances... More rarely their author has recourse to a strong tonality, and, in this case, with audacity, a red illuminates. Its filling alternates cautiousness and risk-taking, success or repentance. And when he is not satisfied, then he maroons a new piece of paper which hides all or part of the previous one, complicates the support on which he intervenes and offers him a new adventure ground.

            Following or concomitantly with this setting of the bottom, it can draw a feature, generating feature, minimal trace of the pictorial practice, mark of the appropriation of space. It is about a linear form, simple first form, ancestral, emblematic of all those which seek to mean. It could be an attempt to sketch the idea of a landscape, a body, a face. But above all, it is a question of marrying or occupying the surface of the sheet of paper, of dialoguing with the accidents which traverse it. This black line, very black, is first, essential, and one feels that before arriving at the surface, it is first a mental space, a means for the one who draws it to apprehend this material which, although flat, is complicated in its texture, in its history, in its space, in its inextricable interlacing.

            The result is first global. A colored ambivalence. Then it is subtle. Subtlety of the gestures nourished of a tenderness and a respect for the venerability as much as the vulnerability of its support. Distinction in the combination of repentances and additions, one perceives the time of the practice of the painter, his hesitations as much as his audacities or his shyness to make appear a form on the paper, to go a little further to see if his audacity will be right of his reserve. Sometimes it results in satisfaction, other times it is necessary to go back, to attenuate, subtract, erase, forget. The time of the practice can be read in it, with the repetition of the same precise, assured gestures, and the meditation that lets the others appear, close and different.

Patrick Le Nouëne