Théo Viardin 'Enigma' Text by Domenico de Chirico June 27, 2024 - July 27 2024 Galerie PACT, Paris, France https://galeriepact.com/ «Great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and shudders for the refined, and, to sum up all this in brief, everything rare for the rare.» Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond good and evil, 1886 At the origin, the hybrid and sinuous question of otherness ostensibly stands out as a limbo with an uncertain and controversial perimeter. The force imposed by the inescapable relational act often emphasizes fundamental questions that, in turn, constitute the foundations of the entire world—or, at the very least, of the human and animal world—and seal some of the most complex evolutionary structures that oscillate from the formation of individual consciousness to the most varied collective consciousnesses. In this regard, the unmistakable pictorial approach generated by the hand of Théo Viardin appears fearlessly before our eyes, presenting itself as extremely visceral yet evanescent, flaming and enchanted, prude and profane, wavering between the corpulent and the vulnerable. The colors smell of warm metal, the kind perceptible in blood flowing undyingly, and the forms appear diaphanous, intertwined, convoluted, and fluid, where in Man, creature and creator unite more than ever. One glimpses a clear need, implicit and voluptuous—not exclusively erotic lust but almost brutally sensorial and carnally uplifting—aimed at undressing something that tends to remain veiled, through a game of back-and-forth between the inside and the outside, a dichotomous contortion of yearning contrasts that whisper the unspeakable to the ear of the innermost and profoundest humanity. All this without ever taking our eyes off the myth, and the imaginative processes rooted in the history of human beings and their most valid attempts to answer the mystery of life. And it’s on the basis of such precepts that the enigma arises and seeps in—that mystery that challenges creators and spectators to seek deeper meanings and to appreciate the complexity and beauty of the unknown in order to create images and narratives that confront the immediate understanding of things and invite one to reflection—a clear reference to that posed by the Sphinx in relation to Oedipus in the course of the Greek myth popularized by Sophocles’ tragedy entitled «Oedipus Rex”. In fact, according to the myth, when asked by the Sphinx, «What being, blessed with one voice, first has four legs in the morning, then two legs at noon, and three legs at night?» Oedipus sharply responds that it is «Man»—in the sense of a human being—for as a child he crawls on four legs, later walks on two feet in adulthood, and then uses a cane in old age. Despite the clue, the enigma cited here, teeming in every molecule of these incandescent and tragic pictorial traits, is twofold in that it concerns indeed the complexity of the human soul in relation to Oedipus’ response but above all refers to the figure of the Sphinx as another being, but equal or close to plausible. So, we could say that it is a shaded and mysterious identity that represents alterity in its highest expression, already conscious of the resolution of the enigma, ready to disintegrate for the love of truth. It is none other than another human being, as are all of Théo Viardin’s entities that seem to tend beyond the tangible but actually simultaneously embody the poetic and raw aspects of the human being itself. In «Enigma,» the flesh and the body are always in the forefront, facing up to the naked other as a mirror image, a gateway to understanding the totality of things and ourselves, soliciting a dialectical observation that investigates authentic sensations and their formal becoming, corroborated—to the beat of layers of oil, vehement gestural brushstrokes, and dense, ethereal glazes—by the most rubicund chromatic alternations that undoubtedly define brand new concepts of both shape and space. Domenico de Chirico