FRANÇOIS-MARIE BANIER INTERVIEWED BY MARTIN D’ORGEVAL

In your photos you are looking for the truth of the subject, the human truth. Aren’t you worried that by painting your photographs and hiding the image you will hide the truth?

When I take a photo, I am not looking for the truth about the person; that is inaccessible. I am looking for the sensation of the other at a precise moment rather than their global truth, which I don’t believe in, which you can’t grasp in the instant. I am trying to render a person at a given moment, the person as they are, in their truth at that moment. And so much the better if that truth covers a broad stretch of time for the model I am photographing.
I am looking for the form of the instant, the climate of the instant, and how, in that instant… For me photography is the mark of the present linked to its past and to the future that will be part of the memory. So these are three components that require a great deal of respect for everything that goes into the photograph, not only the subject but their posture, the angle from which they are taken, which they themselves are not responsible for.
The painting on the photograph is no longer related to the subject – well, when I say no longer that’s not true because it is partly related to the subject and to a large extent to the beholder, that is to say, myself and someone else. The painted photograph is exactly what we do with reality, that is to say, make it something completely different. Our intervention in life is utterly disruptive. When Rimbaud says that we must change life, it’s a very nice statement and very poetic but at the same time it’s a platitude: it is changed by the very fact of our intervention, by the fact of our movement, of our interpretation, of our reasoning and our craziness, and the painting is simply the part representing these upheavals caused by our every step. There is no calligraphy in the signs of the painted photography, no final word, just as there is none in life. There is not one single interpretation, there is not one definitive sentence.

Do you mean that the painting is part of the photograph’s life?

It is not at all part of the photo’s life, but part of the life, space and culture of the painter, of the person who is looking. It has nothing to do with the photo and at the same time it is attached to this photo just as, when I walk, I don’t walk on air. The movement of the brush and the colours on it are not all planned. Can dreams be planned? But it’s not in the world of dream, either, it’s an approach, it’s a brutal, sudden poetic act, like malaria, happiness, winning the lottery, having a row with your wife, the sudden memory of your grandfather’s walking stick, of the rustling of a leaf, a bird taking wing. But I don’t paint this chaos, I paint the way others sing, except that there’s no written score.

You are not descriptive

No, I don’t believe in descriptions, except bailiffs’ ones – and even there I’m not so sure !

When you talk about painting, it comes from deep down, but at the same time it takes a very literary, writerly form. What is it that inspires you; people, painting or words?

I don’t really like the word “inspiration”. I prefer hallucination, which Martin Hentschel used. I am a man of words because I had to invent a language. Perhaps I would prefer to have the silence of wise men. My life is saying, transcribing, expressing myself with the energy of someone who has lived in a world and a milieu that my novels describe as something oppressive. It is not simply an interpretation of the world, it is the total creation of a world that needs to be born. It takes forms from language, it takes forms from colour, it takes forms from current events, from personal memories. You have to think that there are sudden turnabouts, that there are fears, interruptions like… It’s not reflexive painting because I don’t think that much about what I am doing, even though I do think a lot. I’m more the impulsive type, but then who says that there’s not a great deal of thought in impulse? Sometimes the thoughts come so quickly that I am unaware of many of the mechanisms that lead me to a word, a form, a non-form. I paint what I feel and not what I see. At first I see nothing, I don’t even see my own painting. I paint as I love, I paint as I cry out, I paint as one… I paint because I can paint.

You were talking about the world that you have created in your novels, the world that comes out again through the faces, characters, inhabitants and words of your paintings. Are the anecdotes and evocations that one can sometimes read into your paintings important for you, do they have a meaning?

The words in my painting are important for the balance of the painting, for the direction of the painting, but then I can’t say that they are like the rails for a locomotive, because what’s important to you in a locomotive is the journey and reaching the destination. For me, it’s everything. The rails, the scenery, memories, a forgotten face, a journey I never made…

Does painting on your photos make you freer in the way you look at photography? Does it enable you to practise photography differently?

I don’t even look at my photographs when I’m painting. I don’t have a practice. I do everything with the fantastical hope of finding a dimension, a respiration, a colour, and I am always suddenly surprised by what I am doing. I didn’t say pleasantly so, but most of the time there is a world that opens to me, which I was not expecting. I can talk about it as if it were a dream but it’s no dream because it is intensely experienced as painting, it’s very much nourished by what I read, people I met, my desires to encounter and touch others. It is painting directed towards the other, by someone who loves words, colours, others and joy. I think that in my books there is a certain sadness, a certain sense of despair that photography was able to materialise. I often took sad, lonely people in the street. Painting transforms all that, because there is the power of the gaze, of the clash of forms, of all kinds of forms that are added or taken away.

I see the painted photos as the coming together of two opposing gestures. The photography is the result of an obsession, an obsession with people, with encounters, with the exact, apprehended and captured form. Once it exists, printed and mounted, it becomes a support on which you unleash a certain energy. The two creative processes seem contradictory?

That is comparing two things that are completely different. Photography is the truth of a state, it exists, but it’s like the white canvas: forget the photograph, behind it there is white. When I paint it’s as if I were dancing, but dancing on the ground, and then at some point I take off. When you dance your feet are always on the ground. If your feet are not on the ground there’s no photo. So at that moment it is painting. But it’s exactly the same procedure. When I paint on a photo, the photo is the starting point that others can see – the face of Silvana Mangano, Isabelle Adjani winking, waiters in a restaurant, a hoop… They are forms about which others can say: look, that’s what he started from. So it’s more interesting and more amusing for the person who’s looking, who says: look what he did with it, and they can look at the photograph in another way. It’s certainly true that when you know the life of Napoleon and someone like Stendhal mentions him in The Charterhouse of Parma, in your mind, even unconsciously, Napoleon has that much more grandeur. He amazes, he no longer has the same stature, the same colour, but it’s still not the truth either. Nevertheless, if you take away Napoleon, The Charterhouse of Parma remains, the feelings and the emotion remain. Which is to say that photography is an act, a truth violated by signs just as it is violated once one starts to tell a story: tell them about Thursday night, about Sunday night, say this… What people say is never true. These painted photos are in fact as exact in relation to photography as the novel is in relation to a true story, a miscellaneous event, which is to say there is nothing… And at the same time you can see everything there, because the imagination transports reality. Unfortunately I only have one life, and I could keep taking the same photo and painting it differently a million times over; the shock, the folly, the splendour and even the meaninglessness would always be the same. In any case it is always done with emotion, both the painting and the photography. That’s the only thing that connects them in my work: there is always both this same challenge of stopping time and expressing a quest, and giving proof of states, observations. It’s a perpetual motion that is richer than photography, that ultimately has nothing to do with it. Photography stops with man, the painted photo carries on into the imagination, into becoming.

Paris, 3 November 1999

Translation: Charles Penwarden