Michel Thein’s studio,
Algrange, September 3, 2023.
In the attic, a small space saturated with paintings. There is barely enough room to enter.
The ballet begins.
Large pieces of linen, natural and colorful, supple and translucent, are stretched on fragile frames. They are covered with hundreds of small, carefully organized colored squares. Michel manipulates the canvases so that we can look at them. With each movement, they swell like the sails of a boat. A graceful and suspended moment, like the moments that give rise to the desire to get to work, inhabited by a text, a film, a painting.
In the urgency and in the entrances of everyday life. Quickly before. Quickly after. In a restricted room, where everything must move constantly. Push, unfold, pose to do. Move, go out, step back to see. Michel works like a tightrope walker. He deploys his work in the folds of time and space.
Barely finished, dried, already put away, as if nothing had happened, the canvases continue to pile up silently. A new one is stretched.
The size of the studio, the possible extent of the gestures and the dimensions of the fabric found, determine the format of the paintings. It is surrounded, at arm’s length, at the edge of the frame, the back stuck to the limit of this deliberately narrow field, that the work is carried out. It extends between two parentheses.
Walks with his dog Rumi punctuate daily life. The step, the cadence of the steps, the heartbeats that accelerate, the rhythms of nature that unfold before the eyes and the feet, give the tempo that composes the canvases meditated on while walking.
Michel enjoys blurring the tracks. Camouflage, remove the sign of the signifier to leave only the trace, the sensation, the quivering imprint, the echo it produces in us. Like a crossed-out writing, where each letter becomes a small colored square, where only the rhythm of the words counts, and their sonority that resonates in our heads and in our bodies. The squares in turn give the measure. They form a map, the drawing of a path or that of a geoglyph.
And we get lost. In front of the painting, no more landmarks. We navigate in the blur produced by the vibration of the colors chosen for their combined effect. A feeling of space seizes us then. Infinity opens up there. And we bathe in its thick fog.
-Sabrina Vitali-