L’Avant Galerie Vossen
Michel Potage , France
"Michel POTAGE Peintures et Dessins"
Michel Potage, Dans la vase, Technique Mixte, 130 x 195 cm
The theater is set in a workshop in the backyard of a house, a vast room renovated and transformed into a living space where, without a wall, there’s a kitchen, a living room and dining tables. It’s also an anecdote. It features two painters, the owners and a few guests who escaped from a Parisian vernissage that night. No one can say today where the idea for the duettist act the two painters performed came from, but large sheets of drawing paper, two pots of black ink and the calames Michel cut from reeds and stored in a corner of the room had to be set up on the parquet floor. The story begins as a friendly joust, at least in the minds of the spectators, whose pleasure is easy to imagine.
The difficulty of working in public lies in the painter’s obliviousness to the public; if he knows he’s being watched, he puts on an act, feigns passion or, more simply, does what he knows how. The first painter produced, honestly, perhaps intimidated by the presence of strangers, chatting with them, never forgetting them – an actor, then, but wasn’t all this (the place, the audience, the fictitious rivalry) theater? For the second, Michel, the calamus was transformed into a magic wand; no sooner had he touched it than he was transported elsewhere, where the transformed studio, the admiring public and even the other painter had disappeared. He drew; he danced; he drew while dancing, or danced while drawing, I don’t know – I thought of the rite of Tibetan shamans chasing away demons with phurba blows. The audience, joined by the first painter, watched him, aware that they were witnessing an exceptional event, a kind of contemporary mediumistic trance. Then Michel stopped, dispossessed by the drawing, calm again. He picked up the dozen or so leaves and offered them up. In their place, beneath his feet, a large black ink stain covered the parquet floor.
So Michel isn’t a painter, at least not in the usual sense of a tradesman – and the anecdote doesn’t say anything else. He’s a shaman. Long before this trance, in 1982, he had slept in a tent set up on sand in the gallery where he was exhibiting sensitive memories of his trip to Australia’s Aborigines. Here again, he wasn’t playing, he was an Aborigine, he was dreaming…
Excerpt from Olivier Cena’s text in the exhibition catalog.
Solo show of Michel Potage
From May 15th to June 14th, 2025
The gallery
For six years the gallery is creating a bridge between classical art and new medias
Gallery artists
Robie Barrat, Ronan Barrot, Louise Belin, DataDada, Énora Denis, Normal Harman, Julien Levesque, Denis Laget, Prosper Legault, Albertine Meunier, Anna Ridler, Robness, studio u2p050
