The hollow men

exhibition from Wednesday, September 13 to Sunday, November 12.

Catholic University of Lille

60, boulevard Vauban- 59000 Lille

Thierry Diers, The Hollow men

Roaring picture

When Thierry Diers, who worked with big !rms, offered them to take part in the plan for an

exhibition and for a catalogue on his work as a painter, a lot of them gave their agreement in

principle. When the artist explained his plan precisely – its contents, its pictures, the spirit which is

dwelling in it – all of them politely drew back.

What was so dangerous that so solid structures consider there is a risk to help to the birth of this

plan and its pictures’ book ? Was it because they saw in it their own portrait ?

Because of these activities, as an architect and a painter, Thierry Diers knows the decision-makers.

For them, he designed areas and he carried out innovatory concepts to provide humanity and

sensitivity to places made for pro!tability, and where the walls bear the signs of human relationships

whose "avour is sometimes provocative. Thierry has been a lively witness of these exchanges which

take place only at work, a social arena where mocking looks, terse comments, fake greetings and

true stabs in the back struggle away at you. Thierry Diers wanted to illustrate these ‘handshakes

which never occur’, the disgraces, the muttered talks, … .

Thanks to this professional and human bicephaly, the ‘Hollow Men’ series was born.

The designer has been invited to attend in these buildings, to be entrusted with some mission. He

said he was treated as ‘the artist’ (that is to say, in this world, as ‘the blockhead’), so that he was

allowed to be admitted into the company’s private life, thus lowering their guard. He is apparently

harmless : he does not hold the purse strings, does not aim at the deputy chief position and will not

go and sneak to anyone what Mr or Mrs so-and-so told about another one once the door was closed.

The wolves think a lamb has gone for a walk among the pack, and yet…

The architect had the painter in his pockets (unless it is the opposite), and it was more than as

a passive witness that Thierry Diers observed these exchanges whose name only is human. Here

Diers’s work !nds its true meaning : the architect as well as the painter is completely devoted to the

understanding and the expression of the building of relationships between human beings.

Thierry Diers is an abstract expressionist painter. His canvasses usually offer big bunches of colours,

violently arranged on the drawing. They are sentimental, intimate and universal, they invite to

introspection, emotion or to a particular physical link with the pictorial matter. They are rarely about

human !gures, never about politics. Yet here, the artist has felt a desperate need to depict straight

away what he witnessed. The ‘Hollow Men’ series is a fault in Diers’s path, an urgent springing

up which compelled a clear assertion. In the following text, Yves Michaud quickly compares Diers

and the American painter Philipp Guston, an illustrious abstract expressionist. What needs to be

mentioned is that Guston, before being one of the 1950’s biggest non-representational artists is then

considered as Pollock’s equal, was a frenzied political painter who denounced racial and social

violences, and that he turned himself back to the paths of !guration in 1970, painting racism and

imperialism, declaring that abstract art, in hard times, was unsuited to speak about the world and

even less than to change it. He was treated like dirt by the art critic and part of the art circle. If

it is not easy to organize into a hierarchy the genres of paintings, Guston, as well as Diers, have

each of them felt the urge to tell reality in the most explicit way, toning down a bit the usual and

discreet purge of their means. In 2015, the pictures have kept all their strength. In January in Paris,

about ten people have been killed because of pictures. At the time when I’m writing these lines, one

speaks about the eviction of the ‘Guignols de l’info’. This book is self-edited whereas it should be

otherwise. In 2015, the pictures have kept all their strength indeed.

Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand