An architect says: Dominique Perrault

10 March 2021

An architect says

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 12 February 2021, oil on canvas board, 40 X 30 cm

“What motivates me is work on disappearance, on the limits between a presence and an absence of the architecture. Dominique Perrault (1953- )

This morning I was able to get into town for some errands. Everything still a mess and most shops are closed while people still clean mud from everywhere. Mullumbimby, was already a quiet town, but today it had an unnaturally eerie and sad air about it. Piles of soggy furniture and rugs lined the streets everywhere, whole families were still out cleaning up. It’s awfull. I spent yesterday helping a friend mop up his house. The weather has been unstable since the floods, but got out the other day. Yesterday looked been blocked up in the West but clear to the East so I took a chance. 

I like this quote from the French architect Dominiquue Perrault, in a concise little book entitled The Architect Says, which according to the editor, is full of “quotes, quips, and wisdom”, as advertised on its front cover. It’s one of those diary-styled books of easy consumption and comprised of one quote per page. It’s the kind of book one keeps on the bedside. I keep mine on a low oversized, coffee table from Bali, a gift from my sister-law. They are the go-to lounge tables here in Byron Bay where traffic is heavy between the two places. 

I like this quote especially in regards to this picture from the other day, although I’m not certain to be sure to get his cryptic meaning. I only understand it metaphysically. I wasn't familiar with him so I went on online to forage. His most famous work (among so much) is The Bibliothèque National de France, and from that I deduced that he was speaking of empty space and its rapport to the material substance of a solid building structure. So then, I wonder, is he talking about relationships of spaces like we do in paintings? Not sure, but somehow, I can equate it to this picture from the other evening. 

Architects appear to me like one very large family wherein its members possess all sorts of secret histories and intimately nuanced understandings that are communicated silently through some private channel configured only among themselves. They even appear to use an arcane and singular language all their own; a vocabulary of proportion and mass, one that’s privy to themselves, and guarded by an aesthetic status to the exclusion of everyone else. Actually, I will confess that I‘ve always felt excluded from this cryptic circle, and I'm full of envy when in their presence.  

Their grammar speaks of space, light, and volume, I think maybe in the same way that some painters still do. But their concerns are bigger and bolder, more important, than just flat surfaces with colour imposed upon them. They appear more concerned with grand schemes and seem to worry about how we humans, writ large, cohabitate amongst ourselves, in rural settings or in cities. If judged by Art Fairs today, my mild regret, or rebuke, would be that painters on the whole, seem somehow less serious than architects, certainly more insignificant. They even seem more frivolously, narcissitic and irreverent (except Pierre Soulages) than the serious and consequential gang that both house and home us all. 

So being a painter I must now wade into this discussion and either put up or shut up. I was thinking of this picture from the other evening to illustrate my thoughts about Monsieur Perrault's quote. For me, it reveals a delicate range of light, one that permeates a surface of the image with the barest hint of matter.

This notion of ‘presence and disappearance' is what really appealed to me in his quote. In painterly terms, it’s an attempt to capture something as fine as light itself, so fragile it could shatter just looking at it.

In contrast to that, the sea is solid like a building, a deep dark violet mass that contrasts sharply with the light airy sky overhead. There is an Emerald green strip at the very forefront that acts like a doorstep in the first plane of the picture and it allows the viewer to peek into the image like it’s a room. It helps to create a chilly distance all the way up to the horizon line. 

It’s a cool picture with little warmth, save from a hint of the pale pink of the clouds which are in fact, just bits of the white canvas board showing. And this is a great example of how our eyes always will compensate for a missing colour hue. They appear pink to us due to the cool complimentary colours around them. 

Though the sky appears almost empty like a vacant lot between buildings, it’s still space, but it’s made of air and water vapour. It’s an atmosphere composed of diaphanous clouds that stream across it like loose ribbons, they're so pale and translucent, one could easily misread just what is cloud, or what is sky. That effect is what made me think of this architect’s description of presence and absence even if I’m not completely sure of his own meaning.