To say something about Thierry Diers’s painting is then to say something else. Not because everything about it can be said, but rather because, after having spoken about it, there is still something left to be said.

In the same way, after having seen one of his paintings, one tells oneself that there is still something left to paint—and even more things yet to be painted.

And this is not the least of the illuminations of this painting, which turns its back on assertions and definitive propositions, preferring, to frozen conclusions, the eruptive liberation of the desire to paint, and in return provoking an inextinguishable desire to see.

A desire that rises everywhere across the canvas, a desire that no composition manages to organize, like a set of simultaneous blossoming events.

And if this desire—curious, bubbling—were to summon a commentary, it would be only to immediately exceed it, to carry it along in its movement, to draw it into its dance.

One might, for example, try to grasp Thierry Diers’s paintings through a genealogy: this pacified hue, this gesture, this surge—where do they originate?
Among peers—Yvan Theys, Roger Raveel, Eugène Leroy? In Ostend, with James Ensor? With the American brothers Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes? In Thierry Diers’s biography, his experiences, his trials, his feelings? No doubt—but immediately this attempt to retrace the root and trajectory of forms reveals itself to be in vain.

For these paintings are not assemblages of forms that an ideal grammar would order according to rules, arrangements, or systems meant to recount their discourse. They call upon a genetics rather than a genealogy, because they mobilize forces more than they enunciate forms.

The facts of painting—this vibrant blue flatness, for example—do not make an image. In the course of the painterly process, they take part in encounters between melodies and tempos, which burst forth from their own astonishments. Thus, what Thierry Diers paints is not a vibrant blue flatness, but rather the blue vibration of a flatness.

And yet this painting does not belong to an informal aesthetic that would suggest a painting does not need a painter to appear, or that the painter is merely a discreet intermediary. This blue vibration, Thierry Diers paints it: this blue vibration is the color of a will.

The visible events on the canvases unfold within a staging nourished by memory and projected like an aria—a staging of appearances, which is therefore a staging in time.

This blue vibration could indeed dull, dull and then fade away, if Thierry Diers did not also paint its reiteration. In many of his paintings, the deposit of a color occurs and recurs, introducing a whole variety of presences within a single blue. A variety, and therefore a duration—like an intimate duration of blue.

Yet in seeking to grasp the thickness of time, painting easily falls into elegance, displaying a whole catalogue of subtle nuances, a whole sequence of lighting effects, an entire surface of effects—thus designating time as a linear succession, a phrasing.

Time here—what a paradox—both hollows and elevates: mine and mountain in a single land, Borinage mist and celestial Victory!

Undersides show through at the heart of the layers of paint, not as clever effects of revelation, but as a body—fine, taut skin, muscles irrigated, heated, reddened by the palpitations of a measured breathing, by the deep bone, by the nerve.

The paintings of Thierry Diers bear witness to a reciprocally agitated relationship with the world. A movement of restraint, a brief reserve, gives rise to an intense yet fragile representation. Faces observe with determination a path that both invites and unsettles them. The sky soaks beneath dry sand; hands are backs, heads, masks; and sleep is white blood.

It is thus, through reiteration, that the facts of painting are endlessly regenerated. If Thierry Diers returns to a moment of life or of painting, it is precisely to ensure that it remains alive—to ensure that, before our gaze, this moment endures, offered in the language of a painter from the family of humankind, as a perfect surprise.

Laurent Schmidt
Meschers, April 25

/Thierry Diers: A Painting in Abeyance

Patches of color delicately arranged on the canvas. Without insistence. An abstract composition. A great deal of yellow and brightness, something airy. Open. Let us take the year 2019, for example—luminous 2019. That light of the Atlantic southwest for a painter from the north. And then this yellow reveals itself, among others, in all its forms—a yellow that draws the eye…

Fluid, Thierry Diers’s painting is a painting in abeyance, a painting under slight tension, the canvases unfolding ever more fully as time goes by. A painting of inquiry, seeking balance as gently as it does persistently. A very particular balance that emerges from the brush, which never lingers. And when a final point is given to the painting, a kind of hermeneutic circle is found: the work may seem unfinished, and yet—the unfinished is complete.

Our fragilities can be read through his canvases. With freshness and candor… It floats, and that year 2019 brightens viewers through its subtle and elevated compositions.

But that is not all. In Thierry Diers’s work, there is an eclecticism of techniques, an eclecticism that echoes his search: ink on cardboard, watercolor, graphite and gouache on paper, red chalk, oil on canvas… In this florilegium, a groping, an exploration dear to youth… An inspiring artistic approach… Certainly enough to awaken the desire to paint…

Gaëtane de Lansalut
Paris, February 27, 2021

    “Thierry Diers makes me dream and allows me to travel through a world that may appear empty. With prejudices set aside, we then enter a boundless universe where all interpretations are permitted—indeed, necessary.

The luminosity, the colors that construct the emptiness of this world, are filled with beauty, meaning, fascination, and thoughts we had forgotten—an inexplicable approach to the perception of reality. Thierry Diers does not dictate; he calls upon reflection and creates a beauty that has no end.”**

Marc Ramault
Ghent – October 2021

It is said of some that they are a ‘painter’s painter’. I will not say this of Thierry Diers: he is an artist for the nuanced gaze. 

The fine layers and glazes of Diers’s paintings form a strange surface: unimposing yet imbued with symbols, imagination, reverie and phantoms.
Diers is not a linear artist, even less of an art-machine (Maurice Fréchuret’s book on the subject - La machine à peindre - comes to mind).

My remarks, as such, are not linear: they are annotations reaching out like points of a star traversing his 2019 paintings and drawings, chosen for this exhibition. 

To begin, for there must always be a beginning, let’s commence with the most evident: these are abstract works, though of an unusual sort — an abstract painting and some abstract drawings formed of almost indistinguishable symbols, little matter and almost no trace of a gesture, except for a few drips of paint. 

I say, ‘of an unusual sort’, as abstract art continues to thrive yet through particular forms. Today, it is very attractive, very aesthetic, magnificently decorative, nice colours arranged with precise techniques varying artist to artist. In its most intellectual and cynical form, this abstraction is decorative and mechanistic, decorative and mechanical — indeed the mechanic could even have been an assistant. Diers, however, practices a profoundly personal abstraction, embedded with symbols, reverie, memories and reflections — a poetic and dream-like abstraction — neither rambling nor extravagant, even less so surreal, nothing forced nor demonstrative. 

One has the feeling of recognising these paintings, though once the search for resemblance begins; the references we already know prove insufficient. It comes to me in two-dimensional imagery: a resemblance to the ‘Signes’ paintings produced by Tal Coat in the 1950s. If I say, ‘in two-dimensional imagery’, it is because we have come to perceive works only through their reproductions — deceiving us completely of their real, physical state. In reality, Coat’s paintings are thick with paint, yet Diers himself is no ‘matterist’. There is no impasto. There is lightness. The canvas is neither overloaded, nor stiff, nor cemented —yet it is resolved and strong. 

This calls into question: when does Diers consider a work finished? Perhaps when a composition reaches harmony, but this differs with each one. Harmony is born once the last marks and those buried beneath cease to impose themselves: when a just balance is established between the upper and the primary surface, between the top layer and all that exists in its latent state. I am reminded of two paintings by de Kooning: Attic (1949) and Excavation (1950). Here again, the resemblance is deceiving. Upon viewing these works in the flesh rather than over the internet, we realise how terribly compact these paintings are, as much as in regard to their frames as in their depth: tightly framed, jam-packed. There is nothing of the sort in Diers’s work: they float without drifting away. Fixed but not sealed. A backdrop of markings with a surface that floats above without oppressing or enclosing it. 

The palette? Born in Dunkirk: Diers comes from a world of blues and sombre greys, deserted beaches, the elusive colour of the ocean, of veiled lighting - dim and enveloping, the sun never breaking through. Painters never escape from the imprint left by their primordial experiences of colour, whether they be natural or pictorial. Diers carries his Flemish roots with him. In Paris, his colours did not darken: though they were subdued by the lack of external freedom and invigoration so required by an artist. 

A recent re-location to the South Atlantic coast has changed many things. The light has returned and the sun is present, with yellows and oranges — yet still veiled by a mist. At times, I am reminded of a painting by Bonnard perceived through a sea fog — though without anything of the South of course. Another reference presents itself: Turner and his seascapes bathed in the light of his fiery sunsets. Today, such gravity remains, though it has become luminous. Turmoil is certainly present, though serenity triumphs without stifling it. 

Diers draws a lot, everyday: producing studies for his paintings, but not exclusively. Certain drawings are very large. We can see sketches for larger works — Diers trained as an architect and is familiar with the drawing as disegno — but they are works unto themselves too. Certain elements or structures reappear in paintings that re-appropriate, rework and reinterpret that which has appeared in the drawings. Paper does not withstand heavy layers of paint, only soft strokes of colour. Instead, he mobilises a system of division and spatial organisation, based on the multiplication and dissemination of focal points. What in the paintings is achieved through an equilibrium between the deeper elements and the surface, is achieved in the drawings through the teetering balance between lines, scores and divisions – relying on the grace of neither illustration nor colour – or at least very little. 

As for the symbols themselves? According to ones’ own sensibilities, each individual will see that which speaks to their own sensitivities and their own unconscious: people, letters, a heart, a man falling over...who knows what else. No particular resemblance is intentional. For Diers, they are perhaps ideas reoccurring like a refrain, though for the viewer they are essentially material markers breathing life into, animating and supporting the surface. 

I nearly forgot: the colours have softened. Thierry Diers admits his fascination, as an architecture student, with the forms and colours found in Italian Anti-Design, notably in the work of Ettore Sottsass Jr and Andrea Branzi. Perhaps this explains the presence of certain forms and the softness (though never bland) of his colours. Its more implicit legacy can be seen in the joys Diers takes in breaking from the rigidity of rules and expectation, towards the tranquillity of spirit that settles in, when the painting itself takes the lead. 

Yves Michaud, 12^th October 2020. 

   I encountered Thierry Diers’s painting at the Duboys gallery; it questioned me immediately. What was certain was its sincerity. I also sensed creaking, struggles. I instantly associated it with the COBRA movement. I saw a few monsters there, forms that were neither angular nor supple, like a vocabulary resurfacing somewhat in spite of itself. These forms are recurrent and appear—why? how? there or here; he does not really have an explanation for them.
I learned to love this painting, to tame it, to understand its playful side: a crocodile, a fragment of landscape, of wood, a balloon, an insect… And you will certainly see something quite different. I also learned to perceive its contradictions, its conflicts, its fight. Thierry Diers is a painter from the North, and his painting or his drawings are not saccharine like the landscapes of his childhood; they come from his gut. That is why his works sometimes hurt. One has to find the angle of approach to enter them, to seek one’s path, to get lost in them and to discover a dissonant harmony, a sense of frontal confrontation, a colorist.

In 2017 we organized an exhibition of Thierry Diers’s drawings. Today I have chosen to show you the first series made in his studio in Saint-Augustin, in Charente-Maritime, where he has just settled.

Valérie Grais – October 2020

     Sensitive drawings allow time to stretch, in keeping with a “silent clause” that neither excludes nor forbids anything—provided that this nothing is not death-dealing. They show and make us understand that none of their open chapters is meant to be slammed shut abruptly, closed before its time. Within them there is a hard-won right—elaborated over many years—which might be defined as follows: the right to have one’s say, or more precisely, one’s voice in the chapter. Not in order to raise the voice and give in to the amplification of a cry that would have remained unheard, and thus become deafening itself, but to convey a vital complexity, where every relationship, in order to be formed, must overcome an unimaginable fragility of being, and must demonstrate subtlety, attentiveness, and exact circumspection. Each drawing here is careful not to yield to the power of a design, to the temptation of a destiny. It wards off domination.

It proceeds only from the most ancient vigilance (of which the child holds the secret), watching over things so that they may occur and be born, embrace and separate, according to a profound law of free exchange. An elementary attention that matures with time but does not grow old or become encysted. Even before the name “freedom” is spoken and written (and when that happens, Éluard knew it, it is already too late: the worst has occurred), it floats, takes on color, contracts, gently expands, insists little, grafts itself without wounding, feels itself loved by visibility and thus unfolds within a favorable milieu. An advent that is not of yesterday, but that enjoys the present as it settles within it and—discreet miracles—reveals to it new chances (bonds, metamorphoses, fluidities, happy concretions, structures of accord) that lay where no prior assumption could appear dominant.

Thierry Diers draws his lines (and the forms that appear there, distinguish themselves, fold back into them or nest there, move away from them and take on body) from a memory that time refuses to circumscribe. The dead of yesterday are not jealous of the beings who come to live before his eyes and through his hands, an existence they know to be fragile yet unforeseen. Watching over it would be that “voice of the dead enchanter” (Merlin), to whom Apollinaire makes say: “I am dead and cold. But your mirages are not useless to corpses; I beg you to leave a good supply of them at my voice’s disposal. Let there be all kinds: of every hour, every season, every color and every size…” (“L’Enchanteur pourrissant,” Poésie/Gallimard, p. 29).  Without daring to wish to raise the tone (the musicality of Thierry Diers’s drawings would suffer from it, for it seems to be heard in half-tones, never to be smothered), one might nonetheless be tempted to add to Merlin’s wishes: of all worlds—on the condition that these not be assigned by any border, limited by any state or domain held with a master’s grip by some unknown frenzied owner. The works we discover and that offer themselves to our gaze are migratory, passing through, border-dwelling yet essentially stateless; the places they visit lie between the world of the living and the world of the dead, but they bear witness to an attention toward all. They are, mysteriously, useful. They fulfill (and also elevate, without ever looking down on the facts of appearance) an waiting and a wandering no longer constrained by dread or fear. An end to intimidation, an end to humiliation, an end to murderous hopes of conquest.

A marvelous freedom of tone (not free of any anxiety, remaining mindful of the tremors that might shake or threaten it) unfolds its interregna. It echoes (among so many other possible approaches or resonances) this other utterance of the enchanter: “O rich traveler, I am uncircumcised and baptized, and yet I have been to Jerusalem, but by paths other than the way of the cross, and I have been to Rome by paths other than all those that lead there…” The impression invites dreaming: all the paths traced in each drawing, even if merely indicated or sketched, or tied to a time T, are exits, found on all kinds of continents. Their visibility most often comes from uncharted margins where forces yet to come seem lateral, as if Thierry Diers allowed the slightest notable event to arise from an aside (from a point in time and space where the light is never blinding but conducive to the least compressed nuances of being, freed from every form of oppression).

A line of division grounded in strict regard: what happens before our eyes is of yesterday and of today. The traits that emanate from it are sovereign and playful… No clause needs to be fulfilled in order to distill their accords according to one’s own reveries.

Daniel Dobbels — Paris, February 2017

   Inside and outside, near and far: this alternating interplay that animates the entire painting of Thierry Diers has asserted itself in his recent works. The simultaneity of sliding planes, which in turn conceal and reveal an abstract composition, has in recent years been punctuated by the occasional use of collage.

A new dynamic introduces a breathing quality to the canvas within a tiered perspective. Space expands, and the painting asserts its material splendors through the oil technique, which the artist exploits to the full. Colored areas enter into dialogue with pared-down spaces.

The painter claims affinities with Flemish Expressionism, in the lineage of Eugène Dodeigne, Eugène Leroy, and Yvan Theys. Following in the footsteps of Van Gogh—whose geographical path he retraced during his training—Thierry Diers then painted landscapes he describes as “disguised figuration.” Priority is given to color, placed at the service of nature, no longer represented but interpreted in a poetic mode.

As a painter of the twenty-first century, he has also looked toward Pollock and Cy Twombly. Writing becomes the ally of a painting intensely experienced from within. Lines fragment a territory where forms and colors intersect, generously opening out until they exceed the frame, echoing the all-over approach of painters across the Atlantic.

This artist, who constructs through color, expects painting to be a musical composition, an interpreter of our secret emotions.

Lydia Harambourg, La Gazette Drouot, June 2016

       Thierry Diers is a painter firmly rooted in his time, with talent and imagination. Open to the world, his work aligns as much with the French Cobra movement as with the universe inspired by contemporary German artists such as Baselitz, Lüpertz, and a few others.

Pseudo-abstract, his painting is emotional in nature. He makes use of collage and superimposed collage to reinforce the painting’s discourse. The works on display, dominated by blue, should not obscure the fact that his work is generally highly colorful, as found among the “classic” Cobra artists and also among French painters such as Arnal or Wemaere.

With confident painting, a sure hand, and precise brushwork, Thierry Diers is one of those artists who convey messages. His painting recalls and challenges the viewer; abstraction for him is neither formal nor lyrical—it is a constructed discourse. Expressionism is never shrill or provocative, and if one seeks a feeling within it, it is the one surrounding the desire for acuity and truth.

Thierry Diers’s work is interesting in that his pieces offer the viewer the opportunity to reflect, to read questions into them, and to see an artist who does not stop halfway once the right idea and the right expression have been found. This blue period is particularly interesting. It fits squarely within the continuity of work developed over some forty years.

A fine painter to see—and to collect.

Pascal Ordonneau – May 2016

Nothing new.

I walked through Thierry Diers’s Paris studio a few months ago. Hundreds of canvases are stored there, asleep and kept far from view. I advised him to get rid of them as quickly as possible—sound advice, but useless—only to end up standing still in front of the most recent painting, still fresh. Lining up words and sentences about a work of art is an attempt to strike up a conversation with oneself, between oneself and him (the author of the deed), between oneself and others (who may discover it later, perhaps). Needless to say, it serves little purpose—which is all the more reason not to deprive oneself of it.

This canvas dates from early 2015. We are now approaching the end of the year. I do not know whom he was thinking of at the time.

I know what I am thinking of today as I look at it.

The end of 2015 is moving toward its close, worn out by torments and doubts. We shall see whether something worthy appears above the ruins.

I look at this painting.

In it I see the dislocation of flags, discourses, territories, peoples.

In it I see the vanity of wars, the futility of massacres, the impossibility of finding a guiding thread, a reason, even the semblance of a thought within the informational incontinence of the media and communication networks. Painting also serves this purpose: allowing oneself to step aside from the flow. Planes bomb cities and villages. Ruins pile up. Walls rise. All continents drift at the same time. Instability is everywhere.

Nothing new.

What would be new would be universal beauty, harmony on earth, and boredom as a horizon. Thanks to the genius of ogre-man, all this is spared us. All that remains, then, is to grapple with reality. From these dislocations, everything—and not only the worst—may emerge. That, too, is what this painting speaks of.

This is neither an apocalypse, nor an implosion, nor an explosion—not even a drama. Just an epic gone awry, like a disarticulated puppet whose every fragment can still bear witness to a past splendor, but whose whole is rendered shapeless by the tectonics of torment.

For mysterious reasons that escape my ability to analyze them, this canvas functions like an energy “machine,” whose central white hole endlessly redistributes and renews the surrounding forms and chromatic attributes.

This virginal yet sullied vortex allows hope for a refoundation as much as it confirms an endless collapse.

All this without any pathos.

Without any intention.

Without any project.

Without any message.

And it is precisely at this point that the work, in my eyes, finds its place in my symbolic cartography of the day.

To the generic question of the moment—“what is to be done?”—echoed from network to network, from conversation to conversation, from doubt to nightmare, the painting responds: stir, knead, ruminate, dissolve, dig, mix, “mock the drama of destiny,” free yourself of everything, beginning by freeing yourself from yourself.

Through this, we gain access to a form of calm, cosmic eternity—somewhat comical as well. I remained for a very long time in front of this painting. It also happens that I remain for a long time in front of a blade of grass or in conversation with a solitary cloud. I imagine that newborns, the dying, the drugged, or those about to be shot at the moment of the volley must also see such things. It is because they deprive us of these wonders that politicians, ideologues, experts, and hurried journalists are perfectly indifferent to us.

It is because people continue to make dirty white stains on canvases smeared with disordered visions that they are necessary to us.

That being said, today is Sunday, December 13, 2015, and I am going to vote.

AN INNER REMOTE BACKGROUND

When Thierry Diers entrusted me with the writing of a text for this present catalogue, the idea of establishing parallels with artists whose way of painting reminds me of his own came rapidly to my mind. With a painter whose practical experience has been going on for 40 years, whose style has considerably varied during decades and whose work refers to a multi thousand-years-old discipline, the task is arduous. What to choose? Then the assumed title ‘Wandering of a writing’, has been of great help to me. How to describe better the relationship Thierry Diers develops with the history of painting, he who has borrowed, in a disorderly and erratic way, from three generations of expressionists, coming from as many different areas of the globe, and even beyond it?

Thierry Diers’s path, although atypical and strictly personal, is also an invitation to travel to meet a whole breed of artists for whom the canvas is an ‘arena’[1], where inner and violent feelings, but also profound and universal ones, express themselves.

Is it a coincidence if Thierry Diers has grown up in the same geographical area as the first of the expressionists, Vincent Van Gogh? In the paintings of both of them one can find the same hunger for colours, the same way of altering concrete nature into emotional signs. As far as colour is concerned, Thierry Diers has known the answer for a long time. Those who have paced up and down the Northern beaches have probably also guessed it. In Dunkirk, where the artist was born, the grey of the sky merges with that of the sand and the horizon sinks into this indistinct monochrome. The inhabitants did not need to meet Malévitch to know the definition of a monochrome. Over there, there is neither up nor down anymore, neither North nor West anymore, physical landmarks are only language conventions. The result is not a revelation of the immensity of nature but rather the starting point of an introspection. As the eyes cannot hear anything, the spirit has to make it clear – here begins any good expressionist quest.

It is also the starting point of a vision of colour. In a grey world, the latter is not descriptive any more but inevitably poetical, and, to quote and do violence to the poet, the northern painter has got in his mind the blue colour he has not got in the sky since the colour has not such a physical existence, anyway not so far: one has just to look at the aesthetical shock most of the painters of the end of the19th century & the beginning of the 20th century underwent when they discovered the light of southern France – down there Vincent became Van Gogh and Matisse and Derain changed into ‘Fauvists’ and have been the first ones to have launched the avant-garde adventure. Thierry Diers did not wait to discover the South to tackle the colour. His birth to painting occurred on the other side of the century at a time when these data were already quite set up in the history of Art. For an expressionist painter like Diers, colour has straightaway a symbolical and psychological worth, and forms, even when they roll on the edge of figurative painting, are always strongly interiorized.

It is quite important to notice that the use of colour is not a linear one with the artist. The end of the 1970’s and rather the 1980’s and the 1990’s have experienced a quite systematic use of cold and deep shades. One need to wait till the 2000’s (and a certain maturity of mind, a stability?) to be able to see the palette light up and free oneself. But let’s go back a few years behind.

BEGINNINGS

It is on the other side of the frontier, at Saint Luke’s school in Tournai, in Belgium, that Thierry Diers’s vocation as a painter became obvious. The network of Saint Luke’s institutes is a specificity of the country, a series of catholic schools devoted to the artistic training of young people, for which local artists are in charge. There, technical teaching is solid but the young Diers is above all impressed by the exemplarity of his teachers: his workshop master, Yvan Theys, but also by those who, like Leroy and Dodeigne, moved around the school; all of them gave him models of men who were both gnawed and nurtured by painting, of which they knew the history to the tip of their brushes. Theys is sailing between cubism and expressionism, between South and North, a perfect combination for a French man living near the frontier. If Theys is a more figurative artist than Diers, the first one shows the second one how the distortion of a face allows to reach emotion, and how the painting is just as well concerned by the relationship between the components of the picture as by the expression of a certain psychological state of mind.

Thierry Diers, the ex-dunce when on the benches of the ‘classic’ school, was in good hands and found his way. He was even selected for the Belgian equivalent to Villa Medicis. Yet his father advised him to complete his studies in architecture (‘a real job’). We were in the middle of the 1970’s.

At that time, Thierry Diers was wild with his teachers’ training and with all these wonderful Flemish painters he met in the museums of his region: Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Ensor, Raveel, Spilliaert, the list is endless. However close to the Flanders he was, Diers remained a French man and a French painter ends, sooner or later, to go to Paris: the magnetic ogre. At that time when he was a figurative painter, he started again to paint landscapes which were more and more psychological: the maid’s room which he used as a workshop had no window, thus his work was purely a mental one. And then, the shock took place.

THE MOST AMERICAN OF THE FLEMISH

In 1982, Thierry Diers visited a retrospective devoted to Jackson Pollock. Protected until then from the American influences of the last decades, the young painter was deeply upset by these huge all-over canvasses, which were a jumble and pervaded with a new style. The paintings of the following months and years bear Pollock’s mark. Then he came across other abstract expressionists: Robert Ryman, Cy Twonbly, Philip Guston, who will, each of them, have a long-lasting influence on his work. Thanks to their help, Diers swung into abstraction or he rather slid between figuration and non-figuration towards this latter – Diers speaks about ‘disguised figuration’ about his work.

After finding a local mooring and having taken place in some sort of tradition of Flemish expressionism, Thierry Diers discovered his American cousins who are above all temporal brothers. Indeed, if Leroy, Dodeigne, Raveel and Theys are still alive and active at that time, Flemish expressionism as a movement dates back to the beginning of the century whereas its American version creates explosions in the world of art with Jean-Michel Basquiat at its head. When Thierry Diers turns up in Paris, painting in France seems to be reduced to Combas and Di Rosa, in whom he does not recognize himself very well. This primitive painting which refuses the heritage of French and world-wide painting in its full breadth, does not appeal to this painter who, on the contrary, wishes to pace up and down this rich history and sometimes be confronted with it.

Let’s be quite clear on this thing: Thierry Diers mistrusted the schools as any artist of the end of the century should do but his encounter with abstract expressionism probably coincides with personal needs which only a particular style can fulfil. Abstract expressionists have experienced the same path, as Irving Sandler underlines it:

‘Reacting against World War II and the intellectual climate it has created, the future abstract expressionists had come to believe they were confronted with a crisis of subject. The prevailing ideologies – socialist, nationalist and utopian ones – and the styles which gave them their own identity – social realism, regionalism and geometric abstraction – were no longer credible in their eyes. Unwilling to stay in the beaten tracks or to accept any dogma, those artists, in an anxious search for new values, had turned towards their own visions and intuitions. An urgent need of meaning more genuinely linked to their experiences had given birth to new ways of seeing – definite innovations in shapes’.[2]

What Kandinsky found at the beginning of the century and what Pollock and Rothko developed, Thierry Diers experienced it himself: this desire to express powerful inner contents which goes necessarily through abstraction. Motherwell speaks best about it: ‘Their way of reacting towards modern life…rebellious, individualistic, nonconformist, sensitive, emotional…was the expression of an existential uneasiness…No innovation as drastic as abstract art would have been born without the most profound, implacable and insatiable need. The need for an actual, intense, instant, direct, subtle, absolute, warm, vital and rhythmic experience’.[3]

Yet this abstraction needs to keep an important element if it wants to fulfil its mission of indenting the human soul with a scalpel: a kind of frailty, uncertainty, in a word, ‘the human factor’ which prevents the drift towards geometric abstraction. Thierry Diers and the abstract expressionists ‘were trying out unstable, indeterminate, dynamic, open and uncompleted shapes, using directly the medium-painting’s strength of expression to suggest the artist’s particular creative action, his creative presence and his nature.’[4]

By discovering post-war American painting, Thierry Diers helped himself to a multitude of plastic solutions which came to enrich his plastic vocabulary. Theys’s fruitful post-cubism was overtaken by the all-over from across the Atlantic. Thus the picture, and not only the motif any more, became independent. Then the canvas was not received as an analysis of the visible any more but as a total sensorial and psychological experience, the onlooker being caught into a rhythm of lines and springing up of colours. The abstract expressionist heritage is clearly expressed in this chromatic and almost musical organization, and in these obvious body movements: a sign of the painter’s passing through.

PHYSICAL TRACE

Thus Thierry Diers’s paintings carry on with the imperative Van Gogh found and which Americans have so well made the most of. Van Gogh did not satisfy himself with painting whirls in the sky of his Nuit étoilée. One can see the mark of the brush, it passed through without any doubt. It is not only a matter of perception of a town by night through a disturbed mind but also of the pictorial expression of all that. So the mark is as much physical as mental. Pollock brings the combination to its utmost height: its dripping is a ritual dance above the canvas (Diers sometimes uses a similar process) which is as much the sign of a certain mental state as that of the artist’s body. Some of the artist’s canvasses reflect it in an exemplary way. One can think in particular of the paintings entitled Ballade and Tranquille (2012). Generally, Diers’s technique illustrates this will quite well. The artist works ‘in thickness’, adding layers of paint, neither ‘scratching’ nor removing anything. He always works by adding something. The errors, the wrong ways – or more exactly the roads leading to success – are simply covered up. Diers cares a lot about this materiality, taking up in his own way Andy Warhol’s so true assertion according to which everything – the artist, the work – is to be found on the surface of the painting and not in an assumed depth, a quotation Diers enriches in Bertrand Lavier’s way who was adding that everything is standing ‘in the thickness and in the way of painting’. For Thierry Diers, this mass of pigments conceals the history of the work but also the message of the painting…an element we can find in another abstract expressionist painter, Philip Guston, who, for instance, expressed the passion he felt for his wife in For M by a concretion of red paint at the centre of the painting.

THE DEPTH IN THE SURFACE

This thickness of the layers of paint does not for all that mean that perspective must be seen in it. In Thierry Diers’s paintings, there is so to speak hardly ever any. This is once again an element which sets him apart from many European expressionists, but which brings him closer to the Americans. The planes of the painting, with Thierry Diers, overlap one another but are seldom put in a hierarchy. The perspective in them is set out in tiers or symbolical (as it is with Asiatic painters), the whole is always frontal. Depending on what you feel, the canvas either rushes out on to the onlooker (for instance: Sans Titre, 2013, n°23) or it sucks us up (for instance: Sans Titre, 2011, n°2011-d11). In any case, Thierry Diers has very well learnt the teaching given by all these painters who wished to move man in the very depth of his soul. In the very spot where the Euclidian perspective enables the eye to enter the canvas, a flat work immediately stops the course of the sight, and brings it back to its origin, that is to say the onlooker himself. In other words, instead of sinking into the ‘illusionniste’ depth of the painting, the eye bounces up upon the surface of the plane and does the opposite process. If a journey is at stake, it can then only be a mental and psychological one.

UNKOWN COUSINS

Paradoxically, the two abstract expressionists whom Diers is, plastically, the closest to, were unknown to him until recently and thus cannot have had any influence on his work. Here I’m speaking about Franz Kline and Clyfford Still. With Kline, one can find these big coloured surfaces scattered all over with white areas and crossed with powerful lines. Visually, the works which are exhibited here are contemporary cousins. Still does not appear much in the selection, it is more a question of an overall feeling.[5] It is mainly from the point of view of the state of mind that Still’s ghost hovers above Thierry Diers’s work, the American considering painting as a pioneer’s journey on a mythical land:

‘It was a journey one had to do, walking straight ahead and alone…until one reached after dark and devastated valleys a high unlimited plane, in the open air. Imagination, now free from the laws of fear, merged into vision. And the Act, intrinsic and absolute, became her meaning and the support of her vision’.

Such words which Diers could have uttered himself.

COLOURS

From a general point of view, even if ‘action painting’ is mentioned at times in the artist’s work, it is much more the ‘colorfield paintings’ that have been getting the upper hand for a few years, the canvasses which allow to see the appearance of coloured clouds (for instance: Sans titre, 2014, n°2014-d19) enable us to note the idea that here the artist dissolves his conscience in something bigger than he: a universal emotion, a relationship with time, a state of the world…[6] according to him it is the first time he has let the matter work like this, that he has placed himself in the service of liquid pigment, which is free to flow where it wants to. This harmony reminds us of Rothko. It is interesting on that subject to notice to what point the works which have been chosen for the exhibition are colourful. A person who is familiar with the work of Thierry Diers will perhaps be surprised: actually, the artist used mainly cold shades, heavy ones, particularly architectonic, which are used as building blocks inside the plan. Since the end of the years 2000, much more vivid colours have appeared. An expert eye will have seen that all the different shades of blue are here. The famous blue which was missing both in the sky and the sea of Dunkirk? A lot of his paintings have been done in the artist’s country house, at the seaside. The fact that this exhibition also takes place close to the water will have in so far bent the course of the choices. However that maybe, the use of variations around lapis-lazuli offers a new subject-matter for reflection. According to symbolics, blue, which is the colour of the sky and of the sea, is like one of the elements to which it is bound up: associated to the infinite, to the beyond since the sky as well as the sea are realms which are forbidden to Man by nature. In a roundabout way, blue is the colour of the unattainable world, that is to say the world of Spirit – that is why we can find it on the cloak of the Virgin Mary. That is also why Kandinsky covered up his famous horseman with blue, the herald of man’s journey from the earth up to the ether, the very symbol of the spiritual quest. However astonishing as it may appear, it is the pink clouds that put an end to the whole, a sign for a new opening in Thierry Diers’s lexical field which is always in a turmoil.

CONSTRUCTION

However important colour may be, construction is not outdone. Quite a few canvasses are streaked with lines (Il s’envole, 2010), with grids which are fiercely plastered over the motives or well interwoven with them (Note, 2012). One has sometimes the feeling that the work appears to us from behind a bamboo wood or a moucharabieh (Ca bouge, 2010). Maybe it is because Thierry Diers has finally forgotten nothing of Yvan Theys’s example, whose canvasses always display a very strong structure, often staged with the help of a framework. Maybe it is also and certainly Diers’s other activity which leaks out light on theses canvasses: ‘in town’, the artist is also an international architect and achieves a lot of plans together with his painter’s career. The person who is lucky enough to visit the artist’s workshop will see a lot of drawings and sketches cast upon old plans. No doubt this obsession about the building has contaminated the painter’s work who in fact is also turned as well towards the edification of precise relationships between the elements of the painting – one can notice that for the architect as for the painter, the surface of the work is called the plan. As though Thierry Diers was really trying by all means (the physical as well as the symbolical construction – but are not they in fact one and the same thing?) to link between one another the smashed elements of the world, and to find again the primeval unity?

However that may be, we can find again Theys’s dichotomy in this strong longing for construction between Flanders and the Mediterranean, with which the American influence is here mingled, the influence to which Diers was subjected 30 years ago. The Americans, in the all-over, strove after countering composition in the European way, either centrifugal or centripetal – but always centred, deliberately tripartite, triangular, …but Diers, as for him, did not yield up anything from his French heritage. Even if the canvas is well painted in all-over, it is built as carefully as possible. The longing for building is so strong for the artist that at times, colour is only used for this purpose (Plein été, 2012). Even when the pink clouds appear, they remain framed by pieces of adhesive-tape skilfully fixed (Sans titre, 2014, n°2014-d19), which are here to orchestrate this chromatic rhapsody. Other canvasses, less colourful, seem to be odes to this new method of construction (Effacement, 2014): here the tribute cannot be more European, nor more southern: these are the stuck papers of the experimental cubism of Braque and Picasso, a time when European painting soared up, when these two painters are precisely obsessed by the building of the plan.

‘INNER REMOTE BACKGROUND’

All these technical issues, however, pay only a historical tribute to Thierry Diers’s work. One has to hear him speak about painting, of his own paintings as well as of those of others, in order to really appreciate the nature of his vision of art. If Thierry Diers is really fascinated by the ‘scheming’ of painting (like all painters in fact), there is also a whole mysticism which is at work: with Diers, painting is a mission, a vocation, an urgency and a life companion. Sometimes it is unison, at other times, it is war. However that may be, one has to admit that the artist has got an almost holistic vision of his medium. Besides it is perhaps because of it that the porosity between his two hats, painter and architect, can be explained. When Thierry Diers enters into a pictorial process, it is as though several beams shone into a kaleidoscope at the same time. It is a vibration which shakes all his being. When Thierry Diers starts pouring out on his work, it is not unusual to see him swallow his tears in the end. His honesty and his attachment -some would say his subservience- to painting as a medium is such that the phenomenon can occur when he presents the work of an artist at the Duboys gallery of which he is the artistic director. Thierry Diers lives with painting; or rather it is painting which makes him live, not in the financial sense but in the metaphysical one. Painting, that coded language, invented by the first men several tens of thousands of years before writing -and even worse, philosophy- enables him to expel his demons, his enthusiasms but also sometimes to verge on harmony. Like many abstract painters, Diers says he hears music when he paints. Similarly, he enjoys getting in touch with the paintings by touching them and by sniffing them[7]. The artist does not have only a mere optical relationship with painting. It is a fleshy, almost erotic relationship, it is as much a grief as a relief – like the sex act. For him, there is a soul in painting. In that sense, he is related to one of the most famous French artists of the second half of the past century, Yves Klein. Klein was a true mystic and a fake charlatan. When he exhibits a dozen of identical monochrome paintings and when a collector wishes to buy the third one but not the fourth one, or when he sees that the seventh one is more valuable than the tenth one, he understands it quite well. Yves Klein was utterly serious when he displayed the so-called ‘hollowness’ or when he sold his ‘zones of pictorial sensitivity’ in the guise of cheques. As for Klein, painting is above all a spiritual office, before being merely ‘a plane surface covered up with colours put together in a kind of order’ to quote the words of Maurice Denis. Painting with Diers is a plastic and sentimental event, it has already all the qualities of the ‘Gesamkunstwerk’, the absolute work of art as Wagner described it, it moves the senses of Man, but his spirit and his soul as well. Thierry Diers in fact resumes the ancient kandiskian mission, in which painting establishes a ‘communication between the souls’ thanks to a language that only the heart, the spirit and the guts will be able to decipher – much better in any case than rationality. What the artist does with his paintings is to project his ‘inner self side’, a phrase which was found by another artist: Henri Michaux, who was at the crossroads of Belgian and French paths. (…). That is the title of an anthology of hallucinated poems, among which we can notably find ‘Ma vie s’arrêta’:

‘I was in the middle of the ocean. We were sailing. Suddenly the wind dropped. Then the ocean unveiled its greatness, its unending solitude.The wind dropped suddenly, my life made a knock-knock. It had stopped for ever. It was a frenzied afternoon, an uncommon afternoon, the afternoon of ‘La fiancée se retire’. It was a moment, an everlasting moment, like the voice of man and his health smother effortlessly the moanings of famished microbes, it was a moment, and all the other moments rushed into it, snurged into it one after the other, as they advanced, endlessly, endlessly, and I was rolled up in it, buried deeper and deeper, endlessly, endlessly’.[8]

Thierry Diers paints what is in the depths of his inner self, hoping to find there what will link him up to the other men.

Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand
(Traduction: Anne-Hélène Heyriaud des Vergnes)

[1] To take up again the word used by the American critic Harold Rosenberg after De Kooning’s and Pollock’s pictorial discoveries.

[2] I. Sandler, Le triomphe de l’art américain, L’expressionisme abstrait, Ed. Carré, Paris, 1990, p. 9

[3] R. Motherwell, op.cit., p.38

[4] I. Sandler, op.cit.

[5] Some of Thierry Diers’ canvasses, nevertheless, which are not exhibited here, are surprisingly enough in profound harmony with the ‘torn up abstractions’ which are characteristic of Still, but also with the artist’s first non-figurative paintings, such as 1938 N-N° 1 in which he creates dark monoliths, dazzling suns and prehensile members, representing the human destiny in a hostile atmosphere.

[6] ‘Conscience as a leitmotiv was born from a very deep idea of oneself among the artists. Time, identity and the relationship with the world are fundamental data’ Clément Greenberg said about the artists of ‘colorfield painting’.

[7] ‘It is essential to touch the canvas’ he says. There is ‘a pleasure of the matter’, one has to smell the painting: ‘When I enter an exhibition which moves me, I visit it with my nose (…)’. He even turns his back on to the paintings – ‘and I listen to them’. J. Wetzel, Thierry Diers, Face à l’épaisseur du temps, Peinture, 1974-2014, Ed. Galerie Duboys, Paris, 2014, p.4.

[8] H. Michaux, Plume précédé de Lointain Intérieur, Gallimard, Paris, 1985.

Holy patron saints

Like the patron saints in saints’ lives, they fill the pages of reviews and magazines whose names speak for themselves – Challenges, Capital, l’Expansion, bound as they are by dynamism and their prospect. They no longer pose for a full length portrait in the old way as in the old days with Sander or after the fashion of the end of the 19th century or of the 20th century before the 1929 crisis, in the middle of a board of directors sitting round an oval table, in the comfortable club of industry captains or in the stately office of the manager sitting bolt upright in his princely seat. They have become well-known in the media, ‘people’ stars, showing off the individualistic side of a narcissist realistic portrait. In great circumstances, some of them are to be seen holding the arm of some former wife or more often of some new fashion model in the snapshots of society gatherings – for the launching of a perfume, the presentation of the new model of something, a gala evening which owns them a free performance at the opera – on the RSE managering funds.

In the old days, they used to sit for the glory of industry, of the banks of commerce and of the consecration of progress. Nowadays they sit or rather they are ‘sat’ for the requirements of communication, that of the enterprise, that of the professional trade-union and above all their own communication. They become slightly self-conscious figures or portraits for ‘career’, ‘appointment’ or ‘for ascending or declining managers columns’.

Thierry Diers undertook (that is the right word to use) to devote a whole year to a series of paintings of all these top managers and such an undertaking is at variance with the styles of representation I have just been speaking about, not only because they are paintings and because they now date back to approximately fifteen years ago. Thierry Diers really undertook to paint them with what painting implies of slackened stratified time – of painting them ‘in the act’, that is to say during meetings, exchanges, interviews, private conversations, which, before or after the formal boards and councils, lead to decisions.

‘In the act’? One uses the phrase for robbers and offenders caught in the act. There is something akin to it. Not but that those concerned are offenders, criminals, mafiosi or adulterers, but it is because these top managers lead strange lives. They seldom work in seclusion, wrapped up in thinking. They never stop being in limelight. Should they wish to seek seclusion and concentrate that they would not be able to do so, so numerous are the boards, committees, gatherings and meetings which are automatically written down on their diaries by a faithful almighty head private secretary. If they happen to find themselves alone, it is during a flight, in the muffled stillness of the first class, greatly cared for by a discreet staff whom they finally get to know as well as they know their own hairdresser.They are influential men of action, who rather dislike finding themselves alone and lost in their thoughts, and above all left to themselves. They prefer exchanges, secret meetings, news they gather from counsellors, inquirers, partners, competitors, rivals, subordinate associates – but who must not be too low in the hierarchy : their natural interlocutors are their peers and at worst those who are called the n-1.

They are men embodied in travelling, exchanging and trade.

The word trade must be understood here in all its meanings. And first of all, exchanges and commerce. They are actually in trade and negotiation. But trade also implies making profit on this trade. And actually profit is what obsesses them, is a religion to them. Trade is in fact the circulation and the number of times vehicles take a track. And such is indeed their job – communication and the gathering of news which will allow them to come to decisions – or not to come to any, or to postpone them, or to deviate them and quite often, to impede them.

Behind this negotiating constellation, there is another trade, the trade on influence, not in the penal sense according to which you are sent to prison when you buy public decisions with privileges, but in the still lawful sense of an exchange of data which favours decisions. Such is the business of initiates in a world of initiates – and an initiate, as Littré defines him, is one who knows the secret of affairs.

Thierry Diers paints them right in the middle of their activities, even if their work does not look like a real one. He does not paint them as actors, not as people who are posing, but as traders, as listeners and hardly as speakers. He paints them exchanging information with one another or, more often waiting to be spoken to, or making someone wait when he is on the watch to drop in their ears a piece of information, a confidence, a piece of news, a warning, a suggestion, a good bargain. The few occasions when they are posing, are when they want to make a great show of their good mutual understanding, point out a pact, immortalize an agreement which has just been signed. After the manner of the conclaves of the Heads of States always bursting out laughing when they are coming out of a crucial meeting on ecological disasters or on a genocide.

One feels, one sees in Thierry Diers’s paintings that they know they are being watched and that they consequently ‘behave themselves’, not only because their suit fits them. They have an attitude to keep, a ‘countenance’ to have. The word ‘countenance’ is the very word for bearing, the way you behave and control yourself, the way you hide or control your inner self : feelings, passions, interest, anger, glee, desires, lust, opinions, beliefs and even ideas.

Nothing must be shown nor betrayed.

In 1925, T. S. Eliot, the American poet who was going to become English, published a 98 verse poem, The Hollow Men, which became immediately famous and still is. He has influenced writers (King and Murakami) as well as film directors (Coppola) – and painters too, especially Motherwell for a last series of paintings of the 1980’s.

In his poem, Eliot names and describes the men of our times –The Hollow Men– hollow men, models filled with straw who exchange wizened mutterings to utter words devoid of any meaning :

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas !

Our dried voices, when,

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar.”

To Eliot, the ‘hollow men’ were literally the hollow and insubstantial men of Europe’s post world war I. Yet more, they were the men of the time of mechanization, of the times when the industrial and mechanical civilization triumphed. Difficult not to associate Eliot’s poem with the notorious mechanical ballet by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger in 1924 or the ‘Ballet mécanique’ by the Parisian-American musician George Antheil in 1924 too and, a little more backwards, with Raoul Hausmann’s splendid work, as exceptional as premonitory : ‘L’esprit de notre temps, Tête mécanique’, in 1920, which was made out a wooden model’s head flanked by prosthesis which calibrate and standardize this ‘man of our times’.

While discovering Thierry Diers’s paintings, I immediately thought of these Hollow Men by Eliot but in a contemporary version, ‘fancy-dressed’ and ‘restrained’, with a new look ‘great suits and luxury couturiers houses. Countenance and costumes, bearing and clothes – this is what dresses their emptiness up.

A real emptiness ? It is not sure.

Diers subtly suggests that behind countenance there is not but anything, yet something held, withdrawn, repressed, something which is concealed. That is the reason why he has only kept the countenance by neutralizing the faces which remain white – not empty and unexpressive but white. Sometimes some pink or crosshatchings to suggest that below, it is boiling, cooking and burning.

Because after all, they are human beings, just like us, and we are not more privileged to be ‘full’ than they to have the misfortune to be hollow. Yet, they must not show it, they have to stay unconcerned and pleasing, or smiling with a conventional and cosmetic rictus which does not mean anything at all. They must not betray anything, neither emotions nor dissembled thoughts, nor anticipations, even less decisions. They have to show the cold and polished face of power. They hardly dare smile – but it is not a real smile, only a way of letting things glide along.

They are sorts of human models. They have become these characters. They do not even play a double game : they are just what they are when they are showing off.

Where did the idea of this series come to Thierry Diers from ?

At this point, we have to go back to the artist’s process of thought.

Thierry Diers began with an abstract painting but actually a falsely abstract one, taking out from the subject something to draw a true pictorial painting, which had its reference as a painting in itself. With him, Abstraction is always linked up with the starting point of a form, a moment of sight, but the painter withdraws from it to let painting be and not only picture. Throughout the years, he developed this work with a true purpose but there came a time in the 1990’s when it occurred to him that he had to take the artist’s work seriously by becoming an artistic contractor for good.

He then created his own company to offer a number of proposals to other enterprises – arrangements, decorations, environments, works in public spaces or when business events took place. He became a supplier of artistic proposals, dealing with his partners not as a ‘simple artist’ but as a contractor-artist. It was in the course of this new stage of his artistic process of thought that he got to meet regularly rulers, powerful business men, the heads and captains of industry.

I know from my experience (I had myself that sort of collaboration, not as an artist but as a go-between and mediator) that in the business world, artistic and cultural decisions, maybe because nobody is able to study them or take them, or because a great symbolic value is at stake (an actually excessive value compared to the concerned amounts which are peanuts in the budget of the conglomerate), almost inevitably come up to the top grades of the head office. So that the artist or the critic (today the consultant or art advisor) finds himself directly in relationship with the men of countenance and influence and thus can see and study them closely. I remember an event which would have been moving if it had not been so funny, when the ‘PDG’ of a famous bank who was about to be destituted by Tapie and a few others, keeping his self-control despite an already significant number of glasses of whisky at noon, was praising the painting of a painter who was rising to notice in front of his associates who were as obsequious as upset – some time before the imperial seat of the so called bank was mysteriously burnt with the paintings in question…

Yet, the artist or the critic will never develop a close or warm relationship with them because these men do not drop their composure even when they tint it with a hint of good-heartedness or amusement.

Therefore, Thierry Diers has regularly met these powerful men, he has been able to observe their posture and composure, their attitudes and countenance, their behaviour and restraint and, once his business adventure settled, it appeared necessary to him to express his experience in this series of figurative paintings.

These paintings are not numerous. They do not convey a meaning or denounce a condemnation or reveal a hoax. Diers wanted to account in the most accurate way for what he saw, detected and understood. He multiplied preliminary hand pencil, ink and charcoal drawings and drafts. He refused to fall into the easy criticism ‘cliché’ or that of the paintings conveying messages. Diers does not commit himself, being himself cautious, but to my mind, his work is all the more striking. Today, lots of people forget that a description is rather stronger than a denunciation, that ‘inquiry’ journalism is stronger than all the world’s leading articles. While painting his own Hollow Men, Diers goes further than those who caricature them, pretending to blame ultraliberalism or any new change of capitalism : he shows them hollow without denying their human nature.

Then, Thierry Diers has gone back to the painter’s process of thought, in the workshop where he still is. Since then he has enriched and made his figurative abstraction more elaborate. In his artist’s stubbornness as an artist who dares to operate such changes, he makes me think of a great painter of abstract expressionism, Philip Guston, who is carrying out today a complete revaluation. With Diers, the interlude of these postures of men of power is more than an interlude – it is a step within a pictorial and intellectual path, disclosing the same clear-mindedness as in the rest of the work. And that shows the strength of it.

Yves Michaud

1st October 2014

That is why we love painting.

To answer a secret invitation, to be astonished by oneself.

Still, for this mystery to take place, the painter must offer a displaced, fragile world, must sketch escapes for the gaze.

That is why we love to see through the painter’s eyes.

To be unsettled in our certainties.

Still, the disturbance of unlearning, the erasure of faces, the conquest of revealed landscapes must guide the painter’s hand.

That is why we love to smile.

To live in complicity with the artist.

Still, childhood must outwit closed representations.

That is why we love question marks.
So as not to know, and to remain in a suspended lightness without answers.

Still, the artwork must be the imbalance of the quest.

That is why we love touch.

For the temptation to place one’s hand on the canvas, a finger on the trace of a line, the palm sensing the vibration of colors.

Still, one must feel the desire for it.

That is why we love to open the supple pages of a book where one is invited to see, to read, to touch, to improvise the senses and the meaning of images, and the words of the imagination of realities.

To encounter the signs of stories, traces, spaces, landscapes, objects, totems, questionings, exhaustions, portraits.

Still, for this dialogue to be born, the one who casts their gaze upon the pages of the book must grant themselves the supreme luxury of becoming porous to the work.

That is why we love to let our eyes and our mind wander.

To breathe the time of dreaming.

Catherine Redelsberger, Paris 2014

Roaring picture

When Thierry Diers, who worked with big firms, 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 profitability, and where the walls bear the signs of human relationships whose flavour 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 finds 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 figures, 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 figuration 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

   Thierry Diers began exploring the theme of landscape by bearing witness to the spaces around him—the horizon line of the Flemish plains and the North Sea. In his early canvases, we discover a singular visual language, his Northern influences, and the virtuosity of a confident gesture that goes hand in hand with the pleasure of making. He refuses to confine himself to the torpor of aestheticism; there is something else to be discovered. Diers begins to explore other paths—this is 1974.

In this selection of paintings, we accompany him along the paths he has taken and come to understand his knowledge of, and reinterpretation of, the history of painting. We encounter the tireless exploration and interpretation of a space that vibrates between canvas and subject—a living inquiry that makes this body of work unique. TD speaks of a fluctuating “space-time” that he pursues: an unstable intuition that escapes and flees, obeys no rule, and dies the moment he attempts to imitate it.

This approach is far removed from the pursuit of effect or the presentation of a merely consensual idea. TD moves forward and readily quotes Georges Braque: “In art, there is no effect without a distortion of the truth”—a phrase that, like a mantra, accompanies him in his reading of all creation.

For Diers, landscape is a pretext for the introspection of a world, a free interpretation so as not to remain on the surface of the subject. In this way, he seeks to rejoin the path of his predecessors and becomes painting itself. The subject is a pretext for entering a history in order “to be in osmotic harmony with nature and those who came before me.” He cites Pollock and his drip paintings, Rembrandt, Constable, Gainsborough, Turner, Monet, Ryman, Twombly—all share one thing in common: going beyond the real.

It was in the nineteenth century that landscape asserted itself as a genre, freeing itself from the figure and becoming a field of research for light, matter, space, and color. Its pictorial representation was profoundly transformed by Cézanne. Landscape haunted pictorial practice throughout the twentieth century, and historians explain that it gave rise to abstract art.

Thierry Diers also speaks of musical evocations that tipped him into new territory—Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Brel, Arno… Everything is connected in his research: a word, a sound, a touch, and Diers transcends the real toward the timeless through a slow, solitary, and fascinating process.

This exhibition brings together several canvases from an adventure that began in the 1970s, with fear in his belly—the fear of approaching the forbidden territory of emptiness, that of creation; the fear of not succeeding, and the immense desire to discover, a desire that exceeds and calls out. Here, it is a group of paintings that retain within them the tempo of time—the miracle of creation that fixes futile moments, unique and forever alive. This is how history is built, quite simply.

“Landscape” is a constant concern in DIERS’s work. To realize this, one need only leaf through the present publication and the two previous catalogs, published in 2001 and 2010. They already contain, respectively, an essay entitled “The World Is a Landscape” and a chapter, “Space and Landscape.”

Eric Simon, Actuart
May 2014

When, together with the artist, we start on looking at a selection of his works dealing with landscape over 40 years, an expression often reappears : in his paintings he says he is searching for “the thickness of things”. It seems to convey the thickness of the painting : all of them are born from a long process of work. Coats of paint are laid upon the others, colours blend together, threaten each other, get soiled, interfere. One has to be aware of the thickness in touching the surface of the canvas which is recovered with his favourite paint, oil paint, thick and smooth : “It is essential to touch the canvas”, he says. There is a “pleasure in the material”, one has to smell the painting : “When I enter an exhibition which touches me, I visit it with my nose and tears come up to my eyes. It shines, it stirs up”. He even turns his back to the paintings – “ and I am listening”. That is how the thickness of things is rediscovered.

The artist gladly describes his method of working : he puts his marks “at the four corners”, then he starts painting, with the large and wide strokes of his brushes which characterize most of his paintings. The difference with the drawings – which “ lighten the spirit” and allow to develop a “vocabulary” – is that oil paint dries off slowly. Using oil paint obliges you to go back to the painting the following day and the day after. So there is sometimes an overbid “ of elements of writing” he will finally recover as with a veil in order to leave only a few remaining essential signs which he “confirms”. “It seems to be thrown, just like a cry, but it is very long to come”, the artist says. Through this slow sedimentation of many months of work, time itself is present in the painting.

Then, “all of a sudden”, the work is finished. It “works”, Thierry Diers says, as if he talked about an artificial heart. A few decades later, it is still working. “During the rereading of my work and thanks to distance, I have noticed that this writing is still alive”.

The appropriation of the canvas is slow and difficult. These canvasses are already a space in themselves which needs to be controlled : one of his paintings is precisely called “ Til the end” – because this painting leads to physical exhaustion. In order to have the same intensity in the large canvas and the little drawing, you need to fight, “ a match”, you need to climb up a ladder, draw back, move forward, look, take back. You also need to be psychologically well : “You leave your life there”, Thierry Diers says. So, for two years (1995-1996) he stopped painting : “ I made a survey of my paintings, I tidied up the workshop…”. Because “ in painting, you are on a string. People which say that painting is pleasant have never painted”. Pleasant, no, “necessary” yes. Thierry Diers remembers a recent reading, a passage from a book by Jean d’Ormesson whose title is melancholic : “Un jour, je m’en irai sans en avoir tout dit”. Thierry Diers underlined in it a few sentences : “ I have known jubilation and I have known anguish. I have spent most of my life to scribble pages and pages which I threw away as I blackened them. I was desperate. I fell asleep on my work. I hated what I was doing and I hated myself. And then, all of a sudden, I rose above my lowness. I was inhabited by some sort of grace. The words came to my mind by themselves. They followed naturally. They did not even come out of me. They came from somewhere else. They came through me. They used me to be written on the paper”. This jubilation and this despair, the painter says, he knows them : “It hurts you, you are afraid but you know you must do it. There is something which seizes you, you feel like being on a wave, you are surfing and it comes out, it comes out…but it doesn’t come out of you, that is the mystery of it. That is the depths of things”.

This neverending come back in front of the canvas creates a space on the canvas. Space is the theme of the exhibition which this book illustrates. Moreover a few paintings are entitled “space”. One can often set apart a foreground from a background. Sometimes one identifies the upper part and the lower part, the sky, the ground, the sea, a skyline, as in “landscape” (1979) or “remembrance of a landscape – yellow” (1979). In other paintings, these quick lines are maybe traces of grass, of boughs, of birds in the sky. Thus they are “landscapes”.

The “landscape” is the painter’s constant concern. In order to realise it, you just have to leaf through the latest book and the previous catalogues, which were published in 2001 and 2010. You can already find in them respectively an essay entitled “the world is a landscape” and a chapter “space and landscape”.

Where does this love of his for landscape originate from in him ? “ I was born in a town which is far from being pleasant, bombed and rebuilt too hastily and whose soul is coming back along the years”. On one side, there is industry, spread over kilometres”, on the other the border with Belgium, “which you have to cross”. Behind, “a landscape which I like, a belly which has been ripped open and which is not particularly beautiful, the plain of Flanders”. And finally, facing it, “you look at the sea, a magnificent sea. I have always taken delight in walking along it, on these boundless sand beaches. The sand prickles your skin when you, as a kid, are in your bathing costume. The sky is grey, the sea has ebbed back, and the glistening sand is grey and merges into the grey sky, the temperature is cool, there is the wind, the smell and bliss. When you are anguished, you just need to go to the beach in order to relax. When you fail your driving test, when you are in love, you go to the beach to shout out. That is where I feel well. And you walk, you walk in your head. The landscape is the one you have in your head, it is the one I paint”.

At the age of 18, Thierrry Diers paints the landscape he can see from the terrace of his grandparents’ house (1973) : “It is a vast plain with a wood in the far distance and behind it there is the town of Hazebrouck…”, the artist says. But painting is but “the evocation” of it . They are “mental” or “reconstituted landscapes”, which can sometimes be decipherable, like “strolling in the landscape” (1979), which, with its shadows of armchairs, reminds you once more of a terrace. The artist sometimes even identifies them : it is the case for “great canal” (1999) or “ rowing on the great canal (1999), which are remembrances of the years he spent in Versailles. Even if, as the artist says, these titles are attributed to the paintings a long time after they were created.

He arrived in Paris at the age of 24, and then begin the “uneasy” years when he paints “in a grey empty room devoid of any view”, “remembrance landscapes” which recall the “style” of the Northern painters whom he was acquainted with, Yvan Theys, who was very close to the Cobra movement, his teacher at Saint-Luc in Tournai, Eugène Dodeigne, Eugène Leroy, Marc Ronet. Besides, he is “influenced by expressionism and by a tradition in Flemish painting”, though he makes it clear that there “was a cultural border” at that time : “When you lived in Dunkerque, people mentioned Paris…”. As a teenager, alone he discovered James Ensor, Paul Delvaux, (his neighbours in Ostende and in Furnes), then followed Constant Permeke, Léon Spilliaert, Roger Raveel. The “neo-expressionists” Georg Baselitz or M. R. Penck remain references for Thierry Diers, just like Pollock’s abstract expressionism whose 1982 retrospective left its stamp on him. Then the Robert Ryman’s, Cy Twombly’s and Philipp Guston’s exhibitions will follow suit.

Thierry Diers knows perfectly the painters who preceded him. The Art historians explain that it is in particular landscape painting which gave birth to abstract art. The tree motif, which often recurs in Thierry Diers’ paintings but reduced to its outline or just to a trunk, a branch, a leaf, works like a wink at this origin. Even if Thierry Diers’ personal mythology links this sign to the tree-emblem of his grandparents’ brewery.

Thierry Diers who has been influenced by cultural borders, finally settled in the border zone between figurative and abstract painting. “I am not an abstract painter, Thierry Diers says, I am a realist painter”. Making it clear nevertheless : “But it annoys me to give it a resemblance”. For while you search resemblance you “forget what is most important, that is to say emotion”. Thierry Diers resorts to what he calls a “disguise representation”. For example : “That looks like a big bird, but I dare not say it”. There is a kind of discreet refusal to paint all these remembrances which evince a great sensitiveness. And it is precisely because of it that he endlessly comes back to them : “The themes of the first ten years, you are going to work over them again and again all your life long”.

Johannes Wetzel

Paris, March 2014

They meet again in his studio; side by side, they look at one another and breathe each other in, before the fluids of their imaginations gently draw closer. Their senses on alert allow silence the time it needs to settle in. Slowly and inexorably, like stalagmites, the creative act takes shape in music.

Here they are, settled in the corridor of time—of a moving world, and of life itself. Awestruck spectators of a world too fast, too off to the side, their blended writings, their alphabets of signs and letters, remind us of our human duty: to be.

It is upon his drawings—his lines, dots, and marks—that she composes her words, without erasure, with respect. It is upon his vivid, rhythmic, deep, and sensitive texts that pencils, pastels, and colors have expressed themselves.

They recognized one another, and their subtle, living, resonant score asks the spectator we are to take the time to stop. Just yesterday, I was still sitting on school benches, leaving the office to catch my subway, working relentlessly to finish my assignment, fully assuming my responsibilities…

…time passes, time presses.

Where are the pebbles scattered along the paths of our lives?

Let us breathe, and everything will be better—so long has it been since we last heard such a wind of creation blowing.

Thank you.

Matthieu Jacquillat, Paris, 2013

    The Duboys Gallery is extending an exceptional exhibition by Thierry Diers and is presenting four series of his drawings that have never before been shown: Hommage to Louise Bourgeois, Impossible Design, Prince Sultan’s Palace in Taif, and Works on Glass. First and foremost a painter, Thierry Diers is also an architect, and it is around the notion of dessein(intention/design) that he has chosen, this time, to present and reflect upon himself.
Dessein, dessin, dess(e)in. A pencil stroke, a hyphen between practices, a character trait. This is about rethinking oneself, revealing oneself through a gathering centered on the line.

“Construction,” “reconstruction,” “facing the mirror,” “questioning”

The titles of the works are an invitation to reflection, to the quest for a dessein through drawing—“where one wants to arrive.” Drawing is, by definition, one of humanity’s earliest means of expression. Drawing is foundation, tool, and result. It is both the work in progress and the work itself. It is therefore as much a place of research and revelation as of complete exposure.

“Questioning”

The works presented here (the title of the exhibition is indeed Dess(e)in) unfold like the artist’s very studio…

“In research”

Thierry Diers’s drawings function as fields of thought and experimentation with materials: at times oil mixed with colored pencils, ink, pastel, sanguine, collages… large formats, small ones, different supports—glass, cardboard, paper… physical works, in which one clearly feels the force and the necessity of reaching an outcome.

“Towards the light”

Architecture of thought and thought of architecture—of a building, a painting, a piece of music… Drawing contains the idea of its opposite, the idea that it is a whole.

“Beyond”

It therefore engages a system of representation and correspondences—the choice of a representational system—since the artist, in producing a drawing, interprets and synthesizes three dimensions into two. Within it, doubts and incompatibilities come together, translated into matter, into the removal of matter, into traces and the absence of traces.

“Effervescence”

Rounded forms and verticality unfold throughout each of Thierry Diers’s works. Molded, painted, finished or unfinished, these forms interlock, repel one another, observe one another, ignore one another…

“Tears”

Thierry Diers is a painter of relationships. In these recurring circles that expand or cluster together, in this play of balance between masses, it is what happens “between” that the artist brings to the fore—this “between” that makes each canvas vibrate. The titles of the works are part of this link to be determined between the artist and the work on the one hand, but also between the viewer and the work, the viewer and themselves, the viewer and the artist… A poetic movement also doubled by a relationship to time…

Indeed, some of Thierry Diers’s works—Works on Glass—are “reworked” pieces, reinterpreted by the artist himself years later. He paints on the glass of framed drawings, works beneath them again… thus reactivating his relationship to the work and adding a new possibility.

“Waiting room”

Like an architect’s plan, he applies the drawing (dessein?) of his dream, his poetic vision of the project. From drawing to intention, this is a powerful exhibition to be explored through the prism of Relationship.

Caroline Boudehen (Caromaligne)
Discordance Magazine
January 24, 2012

A reading plan imposed itself on me upon the recent discovery of Thierry DIERS’ artistic journey. Everything began with my encounter with “Souvenir and Superimposition of Amarine”, which overlays collages and colored marks onto the remnants of an architectural plan, deliberately left legible at the heart of a composition constructed through allusion to its own destruction. At the bottom of a box/frame, a photocopy bears witness to the memory of this artist’s architectural practice. Today, I place myself in suspension, above and below the protective glass that distances itself from the support. Thus, rectangular stains align in tightly packed rows, while being weakened by trembling traces of verticality and horizontality. The original whiteness of the background is disturbed by age, yet it is dominated by the spiraling movement of isolated points, whose youthful whiteness now asserts itself on the surface of the glass. It is easy for me to retain a trace of this, thanks to the cast shadows of these pictorial gestures, which shade the plane of a troubling memory.

If my words linger so long on this small “super…position,” it is because it opens for me the French windows onto a series of works under glass. Their transparency evokes for me the “history” of a journey through time that plays with the “superimposition” of recent actions upon “reconstructions” of spaces, which may, when necessary, recall the rolling of wave-like forms in perpetual reconstruction.

This current creativity, animated by this return through time, helps me to better dream of a “summer stroll,” whose traces pasted onto paper can take flight, undulating along the path of a colored gesturality. Their swaying signals the mixed nature of their material, while imbuing me with the warmth of a blowing atmosphere. And it is no coincidence that I accumulate punctuations of graphic islets, which can wrap me in the darkness of circles turning in on themselves.

I can now navigate “above the wave” by discovering floating halos that drift across the horizontality of a liquid surface. A double blood-red form suggests to me the sensual immersion of a body, and perhaps its reflection, in this mirror/pond. The tenderness of this new world may be contradicted by the brutal force of charcoal strokes, which assert their dryness and draw me, through their verticality, into the depths of a dangerous marsh.

“Beyond,” I can only confront the darkness of the charcoal, which violently imprisons a world in troubling turmoil. I go round and round within this form, unable to escape, held by almost vertical overlays that nevertheless do not cross the boundaries of the supporting sheet. All that remains for me is to return to myself “in the mirror,” which offers me no image, except for a few timidly pastelized lines, isolated and shivering as they float at the center of an oval encircled by the scribbling of a stressful crown.

It is then that I arrive at the recent period, where I discover a “writing and landscape” that allows me to “take flight” into a space broadly evoked on large-format paper supports. Here, thanks to the mixing of graphic techniques, I move constantly from color to black line, through glidings in perpetual flight. Am I in front of it, above it, and once again beneath it? This space lifts me into the imagination of a creative questioning. My current inquiry finds a possible answer to the right or to the left, before two “Writing Spaces” that I read as a single diptych, standing monumentally before me.

Do I have the right to write that this blurred space mysteriously represses the geometry of its original architectural tracing? Am I not, in reality, too clumsy to dare write about impressions too diluted in space? …and it is not for me to provide the answer!

Bernard Point – November 2011

Artistic collaborator – Exhibition curator, member of the committee of Drawing Now (contemporary drawing fair), Director of the Édouard Manet Art Center, Gennevilliers, 1968–2002.

From design to drawing…such is the reflection lead by the art theoreticians from the Antiquity, from the Greeks’ Idea to the Latins’ Exempla, on to the il Disagno and il Concetto of the Renaissance Italians. Design is the idea, the project which is in the artist’s mind and whose hand is going to convey upon a medium or in the material.

Yet, Thierry Diers is not only a painter but also an architect : the comings and goings between design, working drawing, elevations and their consequences in space, between the 2D and the 3D shaped his mind. His skill of space sciences, of the balance of masses, of hollow and volume, of light, of line, his knowledge of the link of the parts between each other and of these parts to the whole…indisputably enrich and nurture his artistic processes and his plastic space. First he has thought about these shapes, then he has drawn and produced them…From then on, his pictorial universe is highly strange : it is through the multiplication of his lines that he creates plans, through fullness and emptiness. He slowly fights hand to hand with his creations ; confessing that he enters his work as one enters space. He is the work, he is the artist at work…

The “Dess(e)in” / Design exhibition unveils Thierry Diers’ productions which have never been shown to the public before : among these originals, some of them old ones, like these plans of the Desert Palace for Prince Sultan in Taïf which he built during the day and on which he painted at night. Or like this series of the “Impossible Design”…unlikely objects which are challenges to the understanding, jewels of feature and humour. These dess(e)ins / designs are to be found on all sorts of supports : drawing paper, cardboard, canvas but also on glass…and reveal the turmoil of a boiling creativity.

Dominique Ballé-Calix

There is no other path than the one that ventures forth and, in order to be fulfilled, saturates itself with the complexity of the world. And in the painting of Thierry Diers there is no other gaze than the one that lets the flow of suppositions drift, in a slow vacancy, carrying them toward new heights.

This first gaze upon the world takes shape there, when the eye is born from the thing it traverses. And it is valid—once accepted—only if everything begins within this composition, precisely so. The black line, with blurred edges, cuts across space and defines it within its territories. Neither France nor Belgium, but Flanders.

Then, this universe becomes infinity.

So many borders were present in the life of the adolescent. The one that separates Dunkirk from De Panne, the westernmost of Flemish seaside resorts. As a family, they went there on Sundays. Each journey was a celebration—carefreeness, laughter, and the happiness of childhood.

The border of language. What do the forms contain that express the visions crossed by those elusive barriers one must pass when leaving childhood? When, in the gaze, the world slips away?

What does the painter’s eye already see?

Each person must appropriate what remains of their own history. For now, life is a sketch. A cube, an outline, a face erased by a child’s hand. A road already barred, like a subject.

A silhouette emerging from black limbo stands watch like a ghost. The painter conceals.

A frontier between the visible and the elusive.

Between what one seeks and the invisible.

Hidden world, real world. First to hack, mask, suppress. To paint.

Self-portrait: the painters of convulsions and fogs of the Roaring Twenties shape the desires, torments, and secret reveries of a young man.

Vigorous youth surges beneath the armor and grows impatient in empty days. The murmur of dreams yet to come hangs suspended in space. Juvenile modesty restrains the painting of her in full—she whom one observes, loves, embraces.

Already, figuration veils itself. Bodies are ghosts with lost gazes. Color is still a fragile light. The painter still knows little of his own extraction.

Flanders. An old country, lands of history, passages and invasions, a bundle of vanishing lines when those lines shape the landscapes.

Horizons converge; land and sea and clouds blend into a single uncertainty. To paint is to penetrate this mental surface in its shifting inconsistency.

Research.

Research in order suddenly to feel that this is a space, a territory long foreclosed.

To find what quivers in this world and what pierces beyond it.

As for the writer, the blank page is never blank.

The virgin canvas resounds with the silent clamor of an indescribable chaos.

Painting begins long before the act of painting. Thierry Diers alphabetizes the exposition of his landscapes. The unconscious elaborates. And if time is unconscious, the unconscious knows no time. Painting is silence.

In truth, this presumed silence hums with all rumors—those of a language not yet born.

Emotions sail like fleeting ships and float like signs upon a veiled sea.

Everything is a matter of just tone. Gesture and memory: one paints only from within.

Light electrifies whites and blacks when the land grows misty and low clouds gather.

The gray of the North falls like a shroud. But gray—simple gray—is not enough to say, to say everything, to capture what is unleashed, and it never will be.

The grays of all grays burst forth from the night—nights of disorder, always nights of great weather—from the tumult of the formless that still obscures, when the great planks of those thick nights between shores cease to link only darkness and day breaks through.

Neither white nor black, the great gray of all grays docks, enters, and floods the canvas.

The gray of dawn and of the world’s collapse; the gray of cities gleaming under rain; the gray of ports and seas, marshes and skies; the gray of words and invented memories that build imaginaries—those of the North and elsewhere, now or long ago; the gray of a bird’s song with suspended notes; the gray of invisible colors, light as a breath waiting its hour, lurking in the painter’s memory.

Gray that comes from chaos and leaps like lava when the painter wagers his life on it, for painting is a perilous adventure.

That day arrives: each morning is the beginning of the world.

At that moment, in a clear dawn born of great cold, the demanding and untamed sea invades space and weds the blazing sunsets.

Colors advance like a rising tide, born of a desert of ice, in a breath.

The painter alone knew how to inhabit them beneath the glazes, mingled with burning lavas.

Lands now torn open, continuous fractures of landscapes; memories of landscapes are woods, waters, and hedgerows.

Objects and Totems. Thus Thierry Diers names and therefore assigns.

What then are these objects? What are these totems?

Lines, strokes, arcs of circles or ellipses, contours or their absence, stains compose forms of strange geometries—self-assured, sometimes trembling.

Elementary topology, precise, of implacable innocence.

Thierry Diers invents a pictorial code, a language in which languages and signs coexist, referring back to the painter’s intimacy.

There is nothing to recognize that allows itself to be recognized with tranquil evidence.

Here, as elsewhere, truth scarcely exists.

There is nothing left to justify when painting has conquered its own justification. What little one might desire, Thierry Diers masks and erases—and yet carries us elsewhere, where the wind is so light.

The painter’s eye guides the hand, and the hand is autonomous.

Who guides whom? Tension arises from confrontation and from the impossibility of an answer. From this inextricable articulation, from this unrest, freedom and joyful radiance spring forth.

The canvas becomes a window into which color and light rush.

Through the brilliance of colors or their darkening, through their unions, their confrontations or clashes, when light runs its scales and every reef of narration disappears, painting bursts forth.

Something within oneself comes undone, questions itself. What is elucidated endlessly evaporates. What remains of what one believed grounded or sincere? The future hides in the remnants of its dreams. To believe then, to try to believe, to hope.

An immobile traveler or one from afar.

It matters little.

Walk a few meters. Stop. Look. But never cease to shed oneself, to climb oneself.

To disrupt the form of one’s thought and one’s life.

The journey to Egypt was fortuitous.

Upon arrival, a disturbance—a diffuse emotion, seemingly without cause; an unsettling feeling without an appropriate object; an unusual state felt as detached from oneself, unrelated to this land trodden for the first time.

A strange feeling of déjà vu, of recognition, of knowing.

This country was once his country. Once again, he is at home.

Chaos in the qualities of feeling. Past times cannot be reclaimed and tomorrow is elusive.

This mental journey is a “coming forth into the day,” says the Book of the Dead of the Ancient Egyptians.

Each day is a renewal of the world, says Egyptian mysticism, whose people invented painting.

The painter was called scribe of contours, or tracer of contours.

The Egyptians fixed the three constituent elements of painting: contour, figure, ground.

Thierry Diers is an Egyptian painter.

The modernity of Thierry Diers reinvents ancient painting.

To strip this state of all stupefaction, to paint the exhalation of what quivers. From the invisibility of abstraction, to bring forth and show—to paint the imperious necessity of the quest.

From this abreaction is born a shift toward a new relationship with signs, memory, and gaze.

Beyond abstraction and the informal, toward a new representation: to paint what cannot be seen, but must be.

Once again, to cross a frontier.

Here, there is no land devoted to the iconolater.

The blue of the sky endlessly ignites the mysteries of stone.

Color enters through the breach. At times, it invades everything.

The ochres of sands and clays redden until darkening, for disaster remains.

Bodies in suspension, seals set upon the lips of the desert, says the writer in his Memoirs.

Faces dispossessed, blurred, become heads with inward gazes, placed like vessels upon absent or locked bodies. Only what one seeks has value, the painter tells us.

Crosses, faces, bodies—the invisible that appears harbors incompleteness.

When the table is too high, children raise themselves to the height of the world’s mysteries.

To those who painted and sculpted the man who walks through the History of Painting.

Signs, from writing.

Latin cross, Greek cross, Coptic cross, ankh of ancient Egypt, crosses of all human supplications since the dawn of time, black cross of Suprematism when abstract art was born.

When lines cease to cross or flee, round and luminous voids appear—portholes from which one senses, light upon the foam, the wake of those vanished times.

Life ran after its form without ever reaching it. With no direction at all, except to escape evil.

May unspeakable desolation finally cease.

Never had the abyss been so near.

Color rises from this catastrophe. It devours in great strokes or takes everything.

It leaps like blood spurting from a wound.

When, through its crossings, it scratches and tears, it also imprisons.

But it releases the cry.

Carried by subterranean waters that burst from dungeons, it flows and carries with it suffering and death.

Alain Daill, Montesquiou-sur-l’Osse – 2010

Here is something else. Here is Diers. His world behind closed doors, its strange juxtapositions, its manners and its silences, its colors like late seasons. A world with the taste of ashes and honey, of spring and of a nonchalant lunch in the open air under a north wind that makes the laundry snap on the line. Diers is generous: he spares us the need to have seen in order to show us. He gives us his fragile moments, innocent and mysterious. He teaches us to watch over the grace of things, the gentleness of things. His yellow like a great sun, saturated with light, as if stolen from the landscape; his mad modernity, his history, his bearing, life passing by, its immediacy, its clouds, its totems, its violins winding through our ears, that murmur that rises when one draws close to the canvases—then, finally, its whispers and its silences. Diers is carried away, drunk and dancing. He stands on the threshold between two worlds, his own and ours. His: light upon light. Ours: the clamor among the swallows. Two worlds, then, which Diers makes overlap to create something like a new register of painting. He sets forth fragments of his life—gentle or thwarted—through movement, without yielding to the laziness of emotion. He moves forward in search of himself, and of everything else around him. And always, distant yet always there, a slight smile. And it is irresistible.

A good reason to enter his dance.

Céline Navarre, Paris – 2009

Thierry paints the forms that visit him; he paints in order to set them down—simply, tirelessly—to give them a place to live, without ever bringing them to completion. Because incompleteness suits research better; it is more faithful to the world—this incompleteness.

Thierry paints cycles, cycles of forms, searching for their movement. And he makes honey of them, his own oil-jelly. His figures, even when identifiable, are at once themselves—one or several silhouettes, a setting, a mirror—and their other, abstract selves. His lines form a constant link between what we see, what we know, concrete things, and the abstraction toward which painting inevitably tends.

Thus, when Thierry paints a woman, he paints femininity; when he paints a tie, he paints oppression; when he paints a mirror, he paints narcissism—or oblivion. Or rather, because Thierry does not paint these things to force them upon the viewer’s consciousness; because there is always a gap between a thing and its meaning, and because limits matter. They are there, but they are not final; they are limits by proxy, limits of an instant, until another comes along that may pollinate them.

Thierry’s painting is not a painting of certainties; it is as red and anxious as that of his Northern masters, with whom he converses, whom he quotes, plays with, and gathers from—Munch and Malevich. He also says he is searching for the South—Thierry is not afraid of contradictions—searching for the sun and for music, and he paints jazz in a fluorescent burst, killing spleen with pink, with yellow, so much yellow, again and again.

Thierry’s canvases are large; he needs space—no question of confining the bees. It is a release of insects across meters and meters; Thierry watches them take flight even as he paints them. His large canvases, in which movement has been inscribed—things move within them, they swarm with ideas, even when the hives seem dormant, even when signs appear to be lacking.

Hives are never alone. A single hive would make no sense. They are always grouped and organized so that the bees can circulate freely. Following this model, Thierry the beekeeper tends each idea with the same ardor; he multiplies sketches, drawings, washes, canvases. He knows that honey is the product of every brushstroke, every attempt, every rustle of wings from his bees—gatherers like drones.

Inside a hive, it buzzes; a hive is the multiplied movement of flying bees, the blur of all those tiny wings humming. Like hives, the canvases of Thierry Diers are filled with flight and signs everywhere; they are a search, a foraging that has no end.

Thierry does not like endings.

The end of form, of color, the end of sound.

He freely reveals a world of emotions.

Aliette Finance, Dublin — 2005

For thirty years, Thierry Diers has painted with the vital energy of the men of the North. On this boundless land, beneath a sky believed to be empty until clouds suddenly reveal its enigmas, even if he paints to fill the immediate absences of things, he has never ceased to look at the world as he sensed it as a child, through the window of his native Flanders. Whatever directions his work may have taken, he returned to a certain figuration some ten years ago; the architect he remains has always imposed rules and codes upon himself in order to better capture movement, to better grasp emotion.

The series of canvases—created for the Festival—exhibited at the Galerie du Monde à l’Envers bears witness to this quest. Jazz and painting. The awakening of the senses. An insatiable search for the right sound, the unique moment, the unattainable perfection on one side; on the other, the absolute gesture that bursts forth with the brilliance of a poem.

The portraits and bodies of Thierry Diers’ musicians evaporate, and the invisible emerges. Notes whirl through the bloodstream of the setting like black snowflakes. The pianist bends over the instrument. In this tension, the white keyboard rises. He clings to it. He is nailed to it. We circle the dark body of the singer, drawn into a silent triumph. The man is alone. Music is a battle that dismembers him. One thinks of Claude Nougaro.

Marciac, August 2004

Thierry DIERS proposes us several paintings and drawings on the theme of jazz music, on athmosphere that fascinates him and to whom he feels close.

Jazz and paintings are two arts, two senses aroused, and yet one single base, the constant search of “the good sound, the unique moment, the perfect instant...”

Jazz and paintings live, evolve, they are changing. The first one, on stage, is far from the plain rendering. The other one, away from eyes, is not a simple copie of reality. Both exist out of fashions, out of codes, out of periods.

Timeless, they are free.

No right or bad answer, they only are attempts.

No certainty, but the need to create by love of unexpected, for the emotion to come...

All along the exhibition, Thierry DIERS shows the power and the magic of jazz, emphasizing the intensity of the link between the musician and its instrument, and also accentuating “the fantastic harmony” between the spirits, the hands and the sound.

He makes us penetrate the deep sphere of jazzman which reminds us that of the painter in front of his canvas, switching from excitement to suffering, construction to destruction, a fight between fear of emptiness and fear of excess.

Thus, when Thierry DIERS paints a jazzman, he might be revealing a part of himself although ignoring it or without admitting it...

Camille D

May 2004- Marciac

No discourse, just painting,

No discourse about oneself, no discourse about painting. Thierry Diers’ painting does not seek to demonstrate or to conform. It is painting. And the gaze is deeply satisfied by it.

This is an extremely refined art, marked by a gestural ease that unites materials, forms, and colors. Painting is color, made of forms and of matter that comes in layers—masking the form yet acting as a glaze, thus becoming matter-form in itself.
Look at the wall label? That hardly matters, since most often the paintings have no titles.

It was while I was submitting a work by another painter to the jury of the Prix de Rome in 1983 that I saw a painting by Thierry Diers for the first time. Large canvases, in the manner of Jackson Pollock’s Action Painting, caught my eye. I moved closer to observe them more closely, to absorb them. There was no doubt in my mind at that moment: I was in the presence of a painter’s work. These paintings were not merely stretched canvases covered with paint. They revealed a poetic dimension. Later, I lived with some of them, and the joy of contemplating them never diminished.

Thierry Diers is not a man of discourse. His painting is painting one wants to live with—painting that dictates nothing, that carries you along.

Painting, or painters, need not be the source of a discourse. A material form of immaterial presence. Spirituality of human existence? A gateway to hope.

Marie Faucheux, June 2000

In Egypt,

In 1992, he met the dumb and swarming world of signs. He has understood, in front of the hieroglyphs : - words or painting ? – that the painter does surely belong to this silent and lively universe, which unites and links together the eye and the senses, everyman’s destiny.

Spirituality is not a theoretical question and painting, while it is lived out as an asceticism  opened on the world, is undoubtedly the most living message that the mind addresses to the spirit.

And signs are men, characters who are released from the weight of time.

And the world in its marks is a crowd of men at a standstill whose age-old presence offers itself for an encounter.

It is not a crowd of dead people but a multitude of presences that reveal themselves questioning the one who - the inquiring mind - going towards them, is discovering himself.

 Alin Avila, Paris, 1999

The possibility of losing oneself? The desire to find oneself? Beyond what haunts and drives him—consciously or unconsciously—beyond the amalgam of his pasts, his fantasies, his anxieties, and his dreams, will Diers reach the universal? Will he touch us? Thierry Diers remains on the surface of the canvas, navigating its white swells without plunging in, because thus, he believes, he will express the inaccessibility of things.

Faithful to a framework, handling various geometric forms, he imposes rules and codes upon his imagination. Yet this does not prevent him from passing through to the other side of the mirror. Thierry stands before the frozen lake of the canvas. Almost furious, he seeks to “dirty” it, to “occupy” it—to “possess” it. And it is the canvas that “takes” him. It acquires a life of its own. The brush, suddenly freed, begins to paint grids, bars, lattices, spirals, black circles, steps, stairways, unstable, twisted ladders, and soon raised fists, outstretched arms—angry or despairing—hands with open palms as if surrendering, imploring mercy, dark eyes piercing space, ghostly silhouettes running as if to escape the gaze… Then, when the canvas finds its own balance, everything stops and the painter lowers the arm that held the brush. Thierry looks at his painting—speechless, uneasy, sometimes defensive. Yet he relaxes and, smiling, interprets it: grid of my thoughts, reflection of a happy childhood, protective arms, gestures of love, grandparents welcoming grandchildren on a train platform…

These gestures are not desperate cries; they mean “I love you.” It is a positive, warm message. “Through painting, I give back everything I have received—love, values, family… I leave a testimony for my children. The past is hope and the future, memory.”

Here he is trying to pass himself off as a “superficial” painter. Yet, despite himself, the canvas has drawn him in and lets the reverse side of the scene show through. Love? It is represented in all its duality, its cruelty, inseparable from the instinct of death and destruction: Eros and Thanatos. Man? In his fragility, his powerlessness before the raw forces of nature and technology that crush and dominate him. He is but a shadow. Time? In the inevitability of its flight; at times, the artist manages to capture the fleetingness of a “perfect moment,” those seconds of crystallization that justify us and tear us away from our condition in the world… The paintings are flooded with light. Colors become vivid, joyful, fresh. The lines seem spontaneous. It is the innocence and magic of rediscovered childhood. But the perpetual present of these re-creations does not prevent old age, decline, or death. Fog, greyness, groping—the universe of the canvases becomes opaque once more. Only a few signs pass through it: instruments of the surveyor or the architect, capable of measuring space, of giving form to the world… they are signs only of ambiguity.

Thierry Diers’ painting is original and powerful. It is an open painting. Strangely, despite everything that marks and tears it, it is far from pessimistic. It carries within it a personal geology and mythology one longs to explore. A space of dialogue between conscious and unconscious thought, it reflects, in their shifting movement, the often painful inner debates of the artist. It cries out for the right to lead a life other than the orderly, upright one that previous generations mapped out for him. Thierry Diers, despite his efforts to reduce himself to a single unity, is double—like all of us. And the portrait of himself that he draws through his painting is all the more poignant. For it is ours.

Maria Besson, Deauville, 1999

I look at his painting—one or two canvases, no more—and I try to recall the words of those who, at one opening or another, desperately trying to find a figure, a message, a meaning in these strange forms, the words of those men and women who wanted to believe they had understood something and were astonished to find nothing familiar there. Or rather, yes—blotches of color, children’s scribbles, trees, men walking, arms reaching out, chairs that will never see anyone sit on them…
It is often those who do not understand who bring me back to living reality, who reveal to me my overly quick impressions, my overly obvious intuitions. That one does not understand what Diers is trying to represent is, in the end, not so ridiculous, so shocking, or so saddening; it is ultimately a good sign. In any case, it is perhaps not really surprising. If these large canvases say things we do not always understand, it is because, despite appearances, they possess, like him, something absent, something hidden—something deeply discreet, something that advances with the greatest modesty.

I am thinking of Thierry Diers. I am intrigued by painters.

What do they see? How do they see?…
When I think of Thierry Diers—of his sunny face, of his blue eyes always on the lookout for new questions, of his imposing figure, of his laughter so powerfully attractive—the memory of the skies of Flanders immediately comes to mind. Along that coast, the land becomes almost foreign to itself; it is so definitively flat that it nearly disappears beneath the presence of an immense, ever-changing sky that carries our gaze very far. On all sides, space opens toward the great distance: before us, toward the gray, green, or blue North Sea depending on the hour of the day; behind us, beyond the ash trees and poplars, toward the green plains. Everywhere boundaries are pushed back; everywhere light gains ground. The thickness of the sky here produces a kind of inverted vertigo, so strongly are we drawn toward the emptiness above. Diers must have walked the shores of the North Sea, especially when the beach is deserted and the sea has withdrawn far from the dunes. The impressions of childhood remain forever fixed in our memories; it is then, playing with the blinking of our eyes, that we learn to distinguish nuances of color—it is there that the framework of our imagination is formed.

A coastal childhood is marked by an endless “over there.” Distance is its element; no distance can stop it. When he wants to see something, all his strength, his will, all his energy carry him—without apparent effort—toward his goal, wherever it may be. Diers is not easy to subdue, restrain, or worse, direct. He is like a horse that has reared itself to become tougher, braver than its true nature, and of which he himself would be the rider.

It is not surprising that he felt so close to himself in Mongolia. The stories he told me about it and the images he brought back place him clearly within his own universe: the omnipresence of wild horses, infinite freedom across vast desert expanses, wide valleys where rivers with a thousand branches run without haste, sometimes terrifying games of light in the sky, the strong and joyful voices of men beneath smoke-filled yurts delighting in mare’s milk and boiled meats. Space—and the light that lives within that space—is no doubt the essence of what Diers sees in this world. Anything that obstructs this movement can make him unhappy. Not because he seeks fulfillment in a state of perfect ecstasy or tranquil harmony. Watching him live, his ideal of balance does not pass through stillness but, on the contrary, through movement, through the succession of actions, through the power of life.

Rarely inclined toward demonstrations of emotion, toward overly visible displays of anger or tenderness, he translates everything that touches him— injustice, stupidity, separation, death, the beauty of children, desires, projects—only through an intoxicating, protective laughter. Laughter that wards off fear, laughter that announces the presence of life, joyful laughter of renewed creation, laughter that perhaps also doubts. But is there anything better to do than laugh? He does not know. He paints.

Claude Levy, Soisy-sous-Montmorency, 1999

We were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Thierry came from the North and I arrived from the South; he championed the total act of painting, while I was about to abandon it to explore other fields. He worked in solitude, I worked in a group—and yet, from the very first moment of this encounter, there was the breath of friendship. We shared the same artistic perceptions, we used similar words to describe our preferences, and what is more, we shared the same taste for music and design.

I am a lover of contrasts and dualities, because often, behind what appears to us as self-evident truths, there lie secrets and mysterious elements that go straight to the essential. From my very first impressions of his painting, I had the feeling that I had just met a Mediterranean artist, like myself. What gave me this false certainty was, of course, his way of working, for his painting evokes an almost “Italian” sensation. Indeed, a few simple, vivid colors, naturally laid onto the canvas with broad, sweeping, almost furious brushstrokes, combined with very diluted washes, offered us simple forms for simple stories, without artifice or compromise.

Geometric or organic figures, characters, silhouettes, paths… This painting feeds on its own history; it possesses an entire repertoire of forms that shape the letters of an alphabet meant to spell out words that need to be spoken…

But these sensations quickly faded, because this simplicity carried within it too many apparent unspoken things not to intrigue me. I was not dealing with the Mediterranean artist I had imagined, but indeed with an artist who carried within him all the restraint and inwardness of people from the North. And it was with heightened curiosity that I began to question this quality of work. In this territory of contrast that Thierry shows us, if one scratches the surface just a little, there immediately appears—hidden behind this luminosity and this economy of means—something like the emergence of telluric dangers.

They are revealed by muted, deep colors. Darkness comes to devour the light and settles warmly in the deepest part of the canvas. The layers of paint that are not immediately perceptible beneath this false lack of thickness suddenly strike us full in the face, and the North pierces our bodies without warning.

It is curious, for this painting—which at first touch seems to verge on transparency—suddenly transforms, without so much as a whisper, into the thickest and most intimate of pictorial expressions, as if the artist were inviting us to discover here a contemporary soul that stands alongside the most glorious of his elders: Franz Hals or Rubens, who, beneath the charms of “flamboyance,” knew how to lead us to the very depths of things, like alchemists of the soul.

Raoul Hébréard, Saint-Raphaël – 1998

The signs indented on white pages, accumulated layers that are annihilating. Raw materials over raw materials, the forms that return from one painting to another places themselves along an autobiography in which only the author and the victim know the language. He must see the painting in the small hours of the morning; let himself be led to the workshop the same way as one would be led in a little garden, drawings of paradise which minimizes even the Persians. One must enter little by little in this landscape of canvas which draws a history, an internal architecture. The paintings of T.D. do not represent themselves, but himself.

From end to end, it is an autobiography; flipping through the pages you may find the living drawings of his history, his alphabet. The world is moving. Objects, animals flying in space, seized and refined in an instant. Each painting is a page from a book, quickly frozen, these violent objects gives the soul of a never-ending story. Gathered together, they would start moving like movie characters or cartoons.

One must photograph all these paintings painted over the years and make them into a notebook. One would read in it the unveiling of this infinite architecture, because each piece illustrates a sign that returns like an obsession onto another canvas caught a little further in space, in another position, in another dialogue with another sign, masked by another color.

The color of Thierry Diers, masked. Mask the objects, the signs of the first sketch, conceals the landscapes of the first hours in the exaltation of the first creation. The color refines. All the colors are rethought, repainted, reintegrated with black or white. This is how objects float with more spontaneity in space and can impose themselves. The materials (color, object, form) pose themselves on the emptiness. And I suspect that T.D. has a final ambition behind painting and freezing the emptiness. Soon you will see the elementary forms of geometry on his canvas, signs that come from animals: round, rectangular, square. However it is necessary to empty the mind before, decompose the natural forms and transform day after day, the gas of colors into their solid form and fix the whites of walls. This long process accomplishes itself by a sort of ascetic creativity. You see the fruit of reflection.

These canvases without titles (absence of speech, presence of signs, birth of an alphabet, of a personal geography), under construction (and disturbed by their work as if they were giving birth to the world), under-exposed, hollowed by the calling emptiness, erased by the appetite of the whiteness, reveal the daily work. From the paintings to the canvas which eats the wall to retrieve the scope of the epic, scope of the lost horizon because it is accumulated waves to the third dimension, that of the matter, we wait, after the architect and the painter, the sculpture. Here I wait for revolution (meaning the returning to its origin) of an artist and of art.

Laurent Dominati – Paris 1993

The painting of Thierry Diers contains a paradox: his apparent spontaneity is the fruit of slow work and reflection. Isn’t a painter who gives an ear the same as a composer who elaborates out of time?

The painting, its music once interpreted, appears in the real time, like a living project, a “work in progress ? such that we have forgotten the first writing. Let us leave our vagrant imagination in the resonant image.

First of all, silence. This silence favors concentration, openness, discovery of the near future, around which it rise softly, very softly and slowly, a morning haze, gray, without form. The loose strings of double-bass and cello progressively overcomes space, stretching the sounds, barely stretching across the weave of the framework to be the joint with the altos that thickens the interior haze in fog, erasing the horizon between the sea and the sky, this fog that will avoid perspective, cancel the vanishing point and unsettle our perception.

Our blinding sight will multiply other senses, sense of smell, sense of touch…the melody appears slowly like a geometrical wave, the fog is more intense than ever, reinforced by the velvet of the violin, saturating space…we advance slowly, the heart pounding, and suddenly, round the bend appears ample, red. The strong melody of the trombones, trumpets colored by the piccolos-flute sustained by the tremolos of triangle, intense and violent, the revealed form.The sculpted objects, standing clear, whose contours fades into the white grayness of the canvas, like an iceberg, an inner style, the string of thought linking Matisse and the primitives of the Middle Ages, with infinite shades, upsetting/unsettling our balance and our vision of time and leaves us pondering.

As if we are waiting for hours on the beach near Dunkerque, lost in the smoked odor of the haze, mingling rock, boat and sand, the violent and proud venue of the tide.

Jean-Michel BOSSINI – Nice 1991

type-setter of music and performer

There would be a mute clause saying that a clever hand could slide, like an insertion, between the terms of sharing (which is no longer in the past). It stays just visible and will take infinite care of the surface of the painting, as well as the approach (always an uncertainty) of the painter. It would act on time, at the wanted moment, in order to precede our eager gaze and remediate its negligence. It could mingle with a fragmented glimmer – or a desire so ancient that trickles the metaphors of infancy, to be ready – blue perhaps, haunted by evidences that a color other than white would not know how to cover (but that it will continue to seek, between the cold and the blaze, to discovery). The clause would forbid a movement to stop, the eyes to close, the last word to be told. Clause opened, Thierry Diers then quickly detect and save, with the premonition in return that this clause would age the subject of the painting: the eve before every painting turns itself, not only to face it subject, (sufficiently indecisive and intact, and could suffer from it), but above all, to support the living print of the painting.The canvas of T.D. “comes from afar”. They do not have the arrogance to say it; only the proximity as if they were held back by a light discretion, allows itself to suggest that it comes from far. The forms (and the objects that seems to draw its secret), does not take the pressure away, but they internalize it, by seizing the initial detachment, lifting the pressure till the floating limit in which death has no access to.Movement stronger that a drift which goes back to its original backs detaches it and brings it out to the open sea to clear and set free…T.D. knows that his memoir has yet to come.

He knows that he cannot celebrate his paintings by radiating a past that will fix itself onto the false present. He needs to detax every form and every object he meets on the way that are illuminated between two clouds and allow them to build their own memories by being attentive to the gash of time — this unique cut-out will give (the painting) a name. To take out of bound the forms of his painting signifies for T.D. giving the forms back their original load and anticipate their real value. It is why that he can only act with the most extreme frankness, to present the sky at its closest…and he has to leave the scene, that is to say, to paint in pure loss, in the crack of time, which even he himself is not within. The painting of T.D. moves forward – without breaking the angles but not flattening them either to the point where his silence and his grand gesture, a sound could emit, from a bush or a desert zone (complex zone). A sound, a shrill voice, no a cry, not even a lovers’ breath, but a latent clause, his virtual revival. The paintings come forward board by board … and it is thanks to its possible deconstruction that a painting composes itself. The painting organizes itself, but as the force to quieten the force of order (too quickly uttered). The painting conjugates the arc and the boomerang, the smile and the freezing of the start. It seeks and finds the address. It is sufficient for us, today, to note down this in order not to forget.

Daniel DOBBELS – Paris, 1988

Take the paintings of Thierry Diers and they work with a sober elegance which combines symbols thrown in with authority and light colors placed in with care.

The symbols convey objects or events intimate to the painter and that the sole use of sight would not be able to pierce the senses:But whatever, it is the rhythm of the oppositions between happiness (the whole, the emptiness, the open and the closed) and colors.

A painting that holds the distance and at the same time gives birth to the desire to engage in a knowing dialogue: that is the fertile paradox which, I think, gives all the meaning to the painting of Thierry Diers.

Jean-Luc CHALUMEAU – Paris, 1988 - OPUS International, n°111- p 67

The source of the paintings of Thierry Diers seems to draw onto the landscapes in the state of perpetual flux. The representation of time lifts away for him in order to add and add over. Slashes and rips express the illegible script that preserves the nervous, rapid and hazardous stroke that you can find in the drips. They break the color, voluntarily cold, in order to play with the white of paper and the black of ink. One could not refrain from thinking of mural newspapers whose content gets lost in the collective memory to keep a form of anguish which soon gets covered to convey a new message.

Sabine Puget, Paris - 1985

… / In fact, the “Nymphéas effect” primarily affected the United States, from the beginning of the century through the Abstract Expressionists: Pollock, de Kooning, and above all among those of the second generation, Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell. It is partly thanks to the latter—quite well known in France for more than ten years—that it has managed to remain alive today in the work of a new generation of artists: Jean-Pierre Chauvet (1947), Thierry Diers (1954), Xavier Grau (1951), Jean-Paul Huftier (1944), and Robert Stalport (1937).

But what exactly is the “Nymphéas effect”? Certainly not a resurgence of Impressionism. For one cannot repeat Impressionism, as André Masson wrote in 1952; yet once again we may heed his most valuable advice: “move forward!” From Impressionism, these five painters retain an intimate perception of nature. It is a matter of feeling, Joan Mitchell would say: “one must feel something; it cannot be explained—either it is visible or it is not.” Like Cézanne, Van Gogh, or Monet, their daily walks constantly shape a vision. But unlike their predecessors, they do not paint en plein air. Landscapes, for them, are fields of form, color, and matter from which they draw tirelessly.

… / Thierry Diers brings to his work, from his architectural training, a measured gesture, constantly assessing the balance of masses—concerns also shared by Xavier Grau. In their case, the rhythm of work is slower, involving a more constructive organization of color.

… / In the current post-modern context—that of the traffickers in wreckage—such painting appears as a sheer and simple gamble. How solitary is the one who still believes, like Kandinsky once did, that “the creation of a work is the creation of a world”!

Bernard Zürcher
L’Art Vivant — May 1984
pp. 14–15