An exhibition of Michel Potage

The theater is set in a workshop in the backyard of a house, a vast room renovated and transformed into a living space where, without a wall, there's a kitchen, a living room and dining tables. It's also an anecdote. It features two painters, the owners and a few guests who survived the night of a Parisian vernissage. No one can say today where the idea for the duettist act the two painters performed came from, but large sheets of drawing paper, two pots of black ink and the calames Michel cut from reeds and stored in a corner of the room had to be set up on the parquet floor. The story begins as a friendly joust, at least in the minds of the spectators, whose pleasure is easy to imagine.

The difficulty of working in public lies in the painter's obliviousness to the public; if he knows he's being watched, he plays the comedy, feigns passion or, more simply, does what he knows how. The first painter produced, honestly, perhaps intimidated by the presence of strangers, chatting with them, never forgetting them - an actor, then, but wasn't all this (the place, the audience, the fictitious rivalry) theater? For the second, Michel, the calamus was transformed into a magic wand; no sooner had he touched it than he was transported elsewhere, where the transformed studio, the admiring public and even the other painter had disappeared. He drew; he danced; he drew while dancing, or danced while drawing, I don't know - I thought of the rite of Tibetan shamans chasing away demons with phurba blows. The audience, joined by the first painter, watched him, aware that they were witnessing an exceptional event, a kind of contemporary mediumistic trance. Then Michel stopped, dispossessed by the drawing, calm again. He picked up the dozen or so leaves and offered them up. In their place, beneath his feet, a large black ink stain covered the parquet floor.

Michel n’est donc pas un peintre, du moins au sens où on l’entend habituellement : un homme de métier - et l’anecdote ne dit rien d’autre. C’est un chaman. Longtemps avant cette transe, en 1982, il avait dormi dans une tente installée sur du sable dans la galerie où il exposait les souvenirs sensibles de son voyage chez les Aborigènes d’Australie. Là non plus il ne jouait pas, il était un Aborigène, il rêvait.So Michel isn't a painter, at least not in the usual sense of a tradesman - and the anecdote doesn't say anything else. He's a shaman. Long before this trance, in 1982, he had slept in a tent set up on sand in the gallery where he was exhibiting sensitive memories of his trip to Australia's Aborigines. There too, he wasn't playing, he was an Aborigine, he was dreaming...
read the rest of Olivier Cena's text in the exhibition catalog