Interview with the French painter Michel Le Goff and art critic David Rose, 
Island of Hydra Greece Summer 2001

Q. Your works appear purely abstract with no obvious relation to the physical world. Maybe I am missing something.  Is there any intended connection to recognizable shape, form or concrete idea?

MLG:  No, you haven’t missed anything. It might seem incongruous to you being here onthe island of Hydra facing the sunset on this terrace overlooking the sea to interview a painter who lives here, but whose work does not blatantly seek to capture the unique physical beauty of the landscape. In my own way I think that I respond very much to this environment but my response is situated on an abstract plane. You can understand that with a studio situated in such a tranquil location, one is naturally dragged into contemplation. The many aspects of the path to contemplation and the issuing surge of energy it brings about are actually at the root of my artistic production.  I believe that my abstract works on canvas since the 80’s cannot be considered as a series of individual paintings but rather as a continuum, a body of works exploring the realm of two strange bed fellows: serenity and chaos. It is the image of the interplay of this process with the Visual that I capture.
‘ It becomes a tangible record of an investigation of what I like to call my personal neuro-aesthetic quest. In this way I hope to understand better my compulsion towards abstraction in art.

In short – my work is a pictorial research transferred to canvas and initiated by contemplation. And you are right; it is pure abstraction. On the whole, I am against figurative references in art that falls under the term “Abstract”. The “it looks like…” or “it reminds me of…” is really not what I understand by abstraction. If you read my catalogues, you will see that my paintings are often simply named Opus followed by a number. 

Q.  You use contemplation? Are you following some kind of Eastern meditation to achieve your art?

MLG : Not really no, at least not one I have ever heard about. My contemplation is not religiously motivated either. The approach I use is an attempt to leave a graphic witness of a particular moment by a sort of gestural fulguration in a continuous brush stroke on canvas. I freeze in time a significant form charged with the energy of the cerebral activity brought about by my contemplation in progress. 
This moment of artistic autogenesis, which I capture, is the image of my contemplative state, a state I reach when I totally forget myself in the work being created. In my opinion the intrinsic value of each work depends on how far I have reached into the process of obliteration of the Self. I become the modest active arbiter between the cosmic forces of chaos and order on a few square meters of canvas. Bit of a challenge really, isn’t it.

And No!  I don’t adopt a strange lotus position or anything similar whilst I do this.  I’d never be able to paint such energetic paintings if I was frozen still. The contemplation just happens in my neo-cortex discreetly!
Although sometimes, I do listen to music; another abstract art form. In Florence I am constantly surrounded by music as two concert pianists live next to my studio and I am working on ideas with one of them about visualizing music for an exhibition in Italy next Summer. On the other hand, I also listen to the silence on Hydra as you can appreciate it now. Le silence est d’or !

Q. So what we see on your canvas, layers of lines in contrasting colours that zigzag and weave across the surface sometimes creating a psychedelic vortex, are they images that form in your mind when you loose your sense of Self?

MLG: In a way I am going against an artist’s natural tendency, which is to follow the impulse to produce orderly arrangements across a surface. Writers on the Chaos Theory will explain that throughout evolution, inherent forces have conditioned the human mind to seek order as a prerequisite for something to function well. My paintings unravel that and I end up trying to walk the tightrope between order and disorder. In nearly every one of my unpremeditated compositions is what I would call an epistrophe; an area on the canvas the lines seem to gravitate toward or terminate at. This is the result of that aspect of my brain controlled by order that keeps leading my hand back to seek a controlling safe base. 
The contra-impulse attracted to disorder or ‘chaos’ then convinces my brush to depart on a singular inquisitive journey from that base, to be led astray. 
So they are not images that form in my mind, no, but “colour snapshots” of my brain activity that take form on the canvas whilst I am totally detached from the mundane petty worries and arguments of daily life.

Q. Which brings us to Hydra. You have lived for so many years on this small Greek island – so you are saying that this peaceful untroubled unpolluted environment is an essential part of your creative process? 

MLG: This kind of painting process does not go well with the noise of the town, the social obligations, etc. Yielding to that kind of life would make me feel in the present creative process of my art, a “fraud”. The realm of abstraction needs serenity and isolation. I would experience great difficulty in being an urban painter living in Paris, London, New York or around argumentative people. Florence where I also live is about as urban as I go.

Q. Is there any intended message therefore behind your paintings that rejects or criticizes contemporary urban culture and the giddy heights of consumerism and materialism that dominate the cities you’ve mentioned?

MLG: There are those who need to know what do my paintings represent or say, what is the message!  And those who do not question the works and naturally capture the holistic composition and let themselves be drawn into it. To the latter, explanations are superfluous. Let them enter the work, enjoy it, forget their Self in the painting, in the viewing process, as I forget myself in the creating of it.
To those conditioned by iconographical references, to those who endeavor to find at any rate recognizable familiar patterns in abstraction and give them a name, to those materialistic, down-to-earth realistic, objective “no nonsense” red-necks of the logic, I cannot be of any help. 

Q. Well that eliminates a lot of critics for a start. Are you suggesting your work is immediately accessible at face value to anyone and should not be analyzed and categorized?

MLG: Ask the man in the street and he might describe my work as coloured random lines on a coloured background. I am perfectly happy with that. But then, I understand that most cannot help but make associations and although the painting may remind viewers of a maze, of a cathedral window, of Celtic graphism without its symmetrical counterpart, a rainforest, a Persian calligraphical attempt, a Zen scroll a-la-occidental – it is none of those things to me. There is no mimesis in my work, no reference to the Greek culture in which I am immersed on a daily basis. The forms I create spring from the human brain a “mechanism” unsurpassed in sophistication. In terms of artistic creation, the brain leaves both computer-generated fractals and computer random generated forms far behind. I believe that a human creation carries within itself seeds of our infinite potentiality and this transpires only through direct human intervention. You could say that a painting created by a human hand is de facto, ‘transcendental’. The painting I created is pure energy and it will live a life of its own distributing its own energy; it escapes me the minute it is executed.
This afternoon you referred to my work inspired by abstract expressionism. To address your observation now, I would like to tell you that I find this etiquette rather pleonastic. Of course abstraction is expressionistic; what is not? I expect you were referring to the works of Jackson Pollock and his random drippings. I have naturally a great admiration for his late abstract paintings. With few others in the late fifties he was determinant in conditioning our eye to view art as we do today. Randomness came into the Big Picture with him and I would say for me personally much more with Mark Tobey. But yet this new form of artistic expression was in its infancy, it had to grow and it is still growing today. I would say that it grows at a stronger pace because today’s artists far from mimicking the fifties are more familiar with abstraction and also their motivation is now shouldered considerably by new awareness in science and philosophy. You cannot shut the door on Randomness in Art, stick an etiquette on it and shove it into a museum as a relic of the past. It’s very much alive. The basic difference in my approach to Chaos in art is that I believe in a continuity of forms and events through metamorphism and not in a juxtaposition of them as in Tachism or Dripping. A drip dripped, (pause) then another drip (pause) drip drip drip. Cut ! One can single out continuous curved paths easily in my works. Probably one could define my abstraction as “non linear Linear abstraction” but I am conscious that it sounds a bit farfetched. I call it "Kimatic Art" from the Greek Kima, meaning wave. 

You know, someone told me recently that I am “a figurative painter of Music” as I painted last year a series of works sparked by the input of various musical compositions. I disagreed with this view as music is not concrete and I think in this instance, I have painted somewhat the abstraction of abstraction. In the coming exhibition in Florence of the works you will see, there will be only a couple of quasi-figurative works; a circle and a triangle. One represents a computer disk the other a mountain and both carry strong significance for me iconographically. Another work in gold, the pendant to a work now with Shiu Wing steel corporation in Hong Kong deals with magic squares, which I find fascinating mathematically.

Q. Yes, the circle, the mountain and the magic squares are unlike the path paintings because they are made of just blue pigment and real gold. Whilst your path paintings are your most recognizable works you are also known for your unusual use of gold and animal excrement. Can you tell me about that?

MLG : Hydra where I live most of the year has no cars only donkeys, mules, goats. The animal droppings randomly distributed are powerfully apt symbols of a disappearing world. I wrap them in gold because I believe we should treasure what they represent, a natural rhythm of life. I also like the perversion of taking an organic substance that is trodden on and generally despised, then glorifying it with man’s most coveted metal. Using mule droppings in my work is “the exception that confirms the rule” insofar as I never include any type of concrete reference in my abstraction. It is also a humble tribute to this island I live on and visually, they are compelling sculptural objects. 

Q. And the gold? You use it in heavy quantities in some works.

MLG : Let me get this straight. I use gold leaf that is almost pure, 23 karats in fact and fresh from the bowels of Australia. Its raw purity as a material and its mercurial healing qualities appealed to me. Nobody else I know of uses gold on canvas in the manner I do. The reflective surfaces I create with the gold leaf create fields of energy and offer endless contemplative interaction. I always employed the line in relief though, to echo my path paintings somehow upon the gold surface. These works on canvas of random three-dimensional surfaces with gold inclusions are the result of the evolution of the polychrome chaos inspired by the Topoglypte series I created in the seventies and early eighties when I worked with a friend of mine, the American visual artist Richard Lubovsky who worked in Paris and who unluckily died too young. The difference with the Topoglyptes lies now in the monastic simplicity of the random paths featured in my latest works. 
I also wrapped in gold “memories” on hard disk and floppy discs, which I incorporate into some of my works. The Logos has become digital, for some it’s a new ethic, a new religion. I couldn’t miss in my art to be influenced by this titanic convulsion, this attempt to bring digital order into the chaotic sum of knowledge we possess. In the next exhibition you will see in gold chalices gold wrapped floppy disks containing undisclosed disturbing data. 
 
 
 

Q. Why are your paintings so difficult to execute?

MLG : Everything has been pictured. A pot has been painted one thousand times. Copyists copy the works of masters. Whilst my Path paintings may appear similar to each other they are all unique because of the complexity of them. They rely for birth upon unique receptacles of my energy. It is impossible to replicate them.  One could probably mimic some of my paintings but nobody could copy one. At the present, my work is like a global weather system: complex, deterministic and yet, the outcome is unpredictable. 

Technically, it is important for me to have the possibility to modulate the path of the brushwork as my contemplative experience is not linear either. No authentic such experience is.  This is why I personally manufacture a lot of my brushes, I am at present against flat brushes which give linear parallel boring path on the canvas. Almost nothing is parallel, repeated or symmetrical in my paintings though symmetry, structure and order are not excluded, it just is not prevalent. I work on a flat plane – not vertical on the easel so I don’t have the popular drippings and splodges. I am proof that to be spontaneous you do not have to be messy. Although speed is essential when I paint, they are slow paintings to execute because, after having applied the background, I must apply my brush to only one continuous line that flows at a time and let it dry for sometime. A typical work would at least require a dozen sessions. For the sake of integrity of a specific work my initial sensitivity to each session has to be somewhat constant. 
 

Q. Your work, which is a result of your own contemplation, seems to be very egocentric. It does not as you said carry any political or social message or function. I would say it is anarchistic in concept and delivery. How do you justify your work and its value.

No artist’s work needs justification at a particular moment in time, for the simple reason that artists are precursors and what seems to carry no intrinsic value today is bound in time to reveal itself within the evolution of the Visual Art. The Chaos of today might be the Order of tomorrow. Besides, I totally disagree with you on the fact that a work of Art has to carry a message. But since you raise the issue, you should know that any of my abstract works, if one takes care to view it at length, carries an important philanthropic quality, it allows the viewer to take his mind off daily problems and to turn off, in short ‘to relax’. Funnily enough, I was told that my paintings are quite therapeutic for hyperactive people, tense people, people under pressure, etc.
The mechanism is simple: The viewer confronted by my painting is dragged into it by the complexity of its composition. This is a simple reflex I would say. This of course captures the viewer for sometime, standing – or better seated - in front of the work. Due to the inherent human mental processing of information, the viewer cannot help but attempt to rationalize and structure my work in order to extract from this pictorial chaos “Order”. Order will bring what anyone’s brain searches for: Gratification. The viewer is thus compelled to select a particular session of mine in the painting, which translates as following through the canvas a specific coloured line meandering in a multitude of pathways in order to extract its structure. During this process the beholder is totally absorbed in this task. His or her brain has reached a state of detachment from personal worries and occupations. This lapse of time, this detachment is for most people difficult to reach otherwise. When you conjugate this quest for Order to the exciting and disturbing feeling of Anarchy experienced, then you have reached the pleasures of Chaos.
I believe that to have been able to offer this respite to the viewer, in itself justifies the work in regards to the “message” critics like works of art to carry. 
Further than that, I am an advocate of l’Art pour l’Art. I would say that what I have just explained to you now is a by-product of my paintings but not its “raison d’etre”.. 

Q. You say there is no preparatory work, no drawings, no pre planning but is there not any aesthetic intention?

I cannot say there is no aesthetic intention as there is in the articulation of the colours, which give an illusion of depth. The three-dimensionality is played up by the degree of intensity of the layers. That’s why I so often use strong contrasting colours.  Furthermore, I believe that at various levels, we are all programmed to aesthetic endeavour in whatever we create even if some try to fight it.

Q. Yes you do use quite strong colours.

MLG : Well, chaos shouts, it is not a polite thing. I emphasize the optical aggression of my paintings with the crudity of the prime colours I use.
To be consistent with the visual complexity I often use my peripatetic blue lines in the foreground. It triggers a stronger optical response in the viewer. Mine are arresting paintings; they grab the eye. When you have my painting in a room you might forget to look at the Seurat over the fireplace.