Serge Faucher fecit
When I arrived at the School of Fine Arts in 1968, I changed my surname by removing a vowel, the only one to be pointed.
At the same time, I began to paint and show my works under the name of Faucher. For about ten years, I participated in numerous exhibitions, some of them in places nestled, at the time, of enough prestige to earn me certain recognition and notoriety.
At the end of a period of doubt and bad being, during which I now feel that I have abdicated a lot of illusions, I wanted to continue my work on different bases and at the same time I abandoned Faucher one day in January to take back my surname.
I'm not saying that the rest was easy, to want to build something on bases that would ignore everything I had painted until then ...
I forgot Faucher until that recent day when I met him on the Net. It therefore always existed, as if he had continued his career in my absence: passage of works at Sotheby's and Christie's, persistent mentions of past activities, but without any biographical notation (and for good reason) after 1980.
It was thus a reunion with the other that we knew well, another self who would have gone away to return and represent himself on the day when he was not expected.
The desire to reconsider the whole era was heightened, but its momentum nevertheless tempered by the distance, the thickness of the years.
I now come to wonder if my commitment to painting would have been the same without the suspension of this simple vowel; retaining my surname, would I have felt the same desires and made the same efforts?
In other words, would Fauchier, at that time, have painted as Faucher did?
An influx of memory ensued, concerning this period of my existence marked by freedom, a release from things, much greater than the rest allowed ... Faucher, in his time, opened tracks that I probably could not take advantage of.
Faucher painted the entire series of so-called "stick" paintings: perhaps 500 canvases of which only a hundred remain, the rest destroyed, scattered or lost.
Convinced now of an attachment to this identity that for a little I would have almost forgotten, my trouble was further accentuated by the arrival in my current work, in recent months, of pictorial treatments close to those that marked the "Faucher years"; trouble, to find myself thus continuing in the continuity of paintings undertaken thirty years ago.
So my attempts to escape would have been in vain?
And this vowel, I discover that it did not disappear completely, quite the contrary: is it not it that we discover, devoid of point and in the shape of a stick, multiplied on the surfaces of all my paintings until 1978?
Is it not it that persists today overturned or erected in my endless lines and their suspended segments?
The point has jumped, but knowing that it is the mark of a term, both that of the letter and that of the line, to the effects of what I paint I will not seem surprised by its disappearance.
This "i", now that I have taken over my first surname responds to the acute sound that runs through it, we hear only him! I'd like to think he's shouting the presence of what I paint in the middle of my name.
*
With the current hindsight, what in the background was painted, under the guise of comments that now appear to me very (too) marked by the time?
Surely, there was a desire to clean up for a start made from the only route, the only mark of the brush, to start to zero to finally begin.
If I take the enumeration of the operations carried out and as I reported them in some writings: color overlays, permutations, rhythms in the surface, bursts, dispersions, alignments, tidying, disturbing, I realize that I was trying to update the new data on which to establish a pictorial practice without past or referents.
( The art critic and poet Jacques Lepage wrote in The journal Opus International, about my first exhibition, at the gallery du Fleuve held by J.L.Froment, in Bordeaux, in 1973: "... Precise, analytical work, using a deliberately limited vocabulary. An ambition open to a problem where Serge Faucher must clear new paths.")
Nevertheless, the surfaces were modulated, the colors chosen to rhythm, punctuate the expanses; the paintings existed visually and strongly, beyond my willingness to give them to see to the mere clarity of the presentations of their modes of production.
These paintings question me today as if something in them had eluded me and not being able to see what they were wearing: their very evidence.
Today, I always perform similar operations, I always work the same data, with all the thickness of time that separates them, for a search attached to colors with reports that can question, modulate, reveal visual sensations, renew habits to see and perceive.
Perhaps today, am I ready to make one of Faucher and Fauchier? But only the work will have allowed this meeting.
S.F 2008/ 2015
Attempted bio-bibliography by Serge Faucher
Serge Faucher lived in Limoges, Marseille and his traces were lost in Perpignan in the late 1970s.
Little bibliography on his productions: the article quoted by Jacques Lepage, a preface of the same for a collective exhibition in Nice, some working notes published in the same catalogue copied and taken a little later for another event, at the Goethe Institute in Marseille.
A catalogue-invitation for an exhibition with Rouan, Hantaï and Viallat at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
A note in "Art Forum" about the same exhibition.
The Impact III catalogue at the Saint-Étienne Museum of Art and Industry.
Personal exhibitions at the Galerie du Fleuve in Bordeaux in 1973 ,one at the ADDA in Marseille in 1976, one at the AI6 Gallery in Perpignan in 1978.
Several collective events, the most important of which were the Théâtre de Nice and the Goethe Institut in Marseille in 1974, the same year that of the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, " Brunon, Faucher, Gauthier, Monnier " at the Jean Fournier gallery in 1976 and finally Impact III at the Musée de Saint-Étienne in 1978.