When one looks at Coralie J Schmitt’s Encres de Chine knowing nothing of their author, a reference returns almost immediately to the memory of anyone familiar with twentieth-century painting: Henri Michaux (1899-1984), and more precisely his Mouvements of 1950-1951. This kinship is not anecdotal. It is one of the clearest lineages in Schmitt’s ink work, and at the same time it poses the most difficult question: where does drawing end, where does writing begin?
The poet who painted
Michaux is not a painter who became a poet. He is a poet who, at a certain moment in his life, discovered that language was no longer enough. Born in Belgium in 1899, naturalised French in 1955, he was first the author of Plume (1937), L’Espace du dedans (1944), Misérable miracle (1956). His literary reputation was already solid when he began, in the 1940s, to practise ink as an extension of the act of writing.
This literary origin structures his entire relation to the image. Where Franz Kline sees in the black stroke an architecture, where Pierre Soulages sees a matter for light, Michaux sees a graphie. That is to say: a trace that hesitates between the legible character and the pure plastic mark. This ambiguity is the central contribution of his work.
The Mouvements of 1950-1951
The volume Mouvements, published in 1951, gathers sixty-four ink plates accompanied by a poem. The figures are small, schematic, frantic. They are not little men, not characters, not allegories. They are postures. Michaux describes them as “beings on the move”. These beings represent no one. They bear witness to a state of the body when it thinks by itself.
The gesture that produces them is rapid, irreversible. No preparatory sketch. No reworking. The plate receives what passes through it in a second. This ethics of instantaneity makes the Mouvements one of the most singular objects in twentieth-century painting: neither drawing, nor painting, nor writing, but a form with no pre-established category.
What Schmitt inherits
The fifteen pieces of Schmitt’s Encre de Chine corpus extend this ambiguity. Without naming them figures, without lending them a narrative, they treat the stroke as an event halfway between graphic mark and writing. Encre de Chine III, with its descending vertical stroke that interrupts itself, functions like an isolated character drawn from an imaginary alphabet. Encre de Chine VII holds on two curves almost Chinese in their economy. The proximity to the Mouvements is troubling, without being imitative.
What passes, more than the form, is the method: a gesture prepared mentally, executed in a single movement, accepted as it occurs. No retouching. No second chance. This method is not a romantic posture of the “pure gesture”. It is, as with Michaux, a discipline of the few. Ink is only made under this condition. Otherwise, it is not made.
The interval as tool
In his commentary on the Mouvements, Michaux wrote a phrase that is often quoted: “More than the forms themselves, what mattered were the distances.” This attention to the interval, to the space between marks, is probably the most precious legacy he transmits to the practice of ink.
Schmitt inherits this directly. In her Encres de Chine, the void that surrounds the stroke is never a background. It is an actor. It bears, it sustains, it makes the reading of the mark possible. This logic meets, by other routes, that of the Japanese aesthetics of ma. But it is through Michaux that it enters Schmitt’s vocabulary, not through a journey to Japan or a direct familiarity with zen calligraphy.
The acknowledged divergences
At least three differences distinguish Schmitt’s Encres from Michaux’s Mouvements.
Scale. Michaux’s plates are small, book-format, made to be held in hand and turned in a reading motion. Schmitt’s inks assume a wider format, which destines them for the wall and the distance of the gaze.
Relation to text. The Mouvements are published with a poem. They are inseparable, in Michaux’s mind, from a literary dimension. Schmitt’s Encres de Chine carry no title, no commentary, no verbal address. The mark must hold on its own.
The latent figure. In Michaux, despite the apparent abstraction, one can always make out a human silhouette, a being in posture. In Schmitt, this latent figure is absent. The mark refers to no body. It is, more radically still, pure plasticity.
The lesson that remains
What Schmitt extends from Michaux, beyond these divergences, is the conviction that an ink stroke can be enough. Not as technical exercise. Not as preparatory study. As finished work. This conviction is precious, because it is constantly threatened by the common sense of painting, which demands that a work be dense, elaborate, “finished”.
Michaux spent his life defending the opposite. His best inks hold on three or four marks. Schmitt extends this position, in a different medium and format, but with the same ethics: leave on the paper only what must be there, and trust the paper for the rest.
Sources and further reading
- Henri Michaux, Mouvements, Gallimard, 1951
- Henri Michaux, Émergences-Résurgences, Skira, 1972
- Raymond Bellour, Henri Michaux, Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 1998-2004, 3 volumes
- Henri Michaux : peindre, composer, écrire, Centre Pompidou and Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1999, exhibition catalogue
