XXle century is in search of a new faith, a fertile syncretism between the values
of the East and the Occident in order to thwart the artificial attitudes of the
makers of images or heteroclite installations. The experiments of the artists,
the erudite speeches of some criticize art did not convince us. Art is not only the mirror which a company wants to give itself well :
it further carries the ambition of its search by announcing a new form from
thought and action in the fields of reality and from virtual, the materiality of the
designed things and their aspect symbolic system, metaphysics.
We know that the death of art is only one myth, like that of the end of the
religions. A new Zen spirit must inaugurate this century by preaching
a stripped art of artifices and in connection with balances, the forces of
nature. It symbolizes the return to a significant creation which uses the
traditional and contemporary techniques as well.
It is an eclectic art, drawing its sources in works of the artists of the XXe
century inspired by Eastern civilizations, of their philosophy. It is opposed to
the contemporary practices aiming to reflect or denounce our production,
ways of life, communication and which use a media network orchestrated by
sponsors, galleries, merchants of art as it s:oppose with very practical
revealing the many phantasms caused by the artificial life which insidiously
became ours. It is a question of finding a dash of purity, to find to be it
behind appearing it, to develop sublimates it not and soiled.
The Zen spirit can take as a starting point the the Eastern practices, but
especially it aims at promoting a more positive attitude, more anchored in the
elements of our medium, the rates/rhythms of time, energies antagonistic
and complementary to the matter.
The artist Zen is in permanent search of a balance which incarne in a form,
a structure, a matter, a fragment of the energy of the world. Its work is
mediating between its spirit and the spirit of the nature to which it belongs.
Its production is antiplethoric and of tendency minimalist as for the means
implemented. (the vacuum is regarded as the demonstration of an presence-
absence) work is at the same time rest and movement, dispersion and
cohesion, brittleness and force. (Yin and Yang) It is the fruit of a meditation
as much as the product of a sum of experiments. It transcends the
communication, the language, the words: it is a significant search of
inexpressible We can as of now reading again the history of the XXe century
by rejecting the artists having devalued the statute by the work of art, having
reduced it to a simple sterile concept, a philosophical speech or spreading
themselves in a productive bulimia encouraged by the market of art.
Art can express health (answer of Yves Klein to a question of Marcel
Duchamp), but in the direction or it the positive aspirations human being in
its natural environment develops. More still, it can be the expression of an
ethics more than of an esthetics, of maieutic of the wisdom which goes well
with-clelàde the legal tender act. Western technologies artificialisé the life,
rejected thousand-year-old forms of sensitivity to the oubliettes of the history.
A thought orders to us to act in the way which corresponds to our vital
sensitivity and which represses our unverifiable moods or our irrational
impulses. The human being is a fragile balance of knowing and ignorance.
Its creation is not synonymous with media agitation or aesthetic wild
imaginings: it must be immersed in its major conscience to sereinement
express a share of its meditation, to find the way right. We are at the same
time nothing and the whole, the microscome and the macrocosm.
It is necessary to awake our consciences deadened by the plethoric
productions of an art which does not say any more its name and to find, in
an esthetics of the accuracy (and not of the subjective beauty) the feeling of
membership of our intrinsic quality to be cosmic.

Philippe Vacher - July 2002 - Viêt - Nam