Frank Maes


The Enchanted Loom
About work by Marcel Berlanger


However often one has experimented with visual illusions, however much understanding one gathers of the mechanisms that produce the effect of illusion, however convinced one is
that what one sees is false, the sensitivity for illusion stays intact; apparently the susceptibility for optical illusions is fixed into some part of our source code which cannot be altered. Douwe Draaisma

Joseph-Marie Jacquard was the inventor of the automatic loom in the early 19th century. His reputation was established after winning a competition held by the Royal Society in London for the construction of a fishnet knitting machine. Jacquard built a machine that could weave large patterns with curved lines. The knitting instructions were perforated cardboard cards that were passed through the machine like music rolls through a mechanical piano. As soon as Jacquard had finished developing his automatic loom, he wanted to demonstrate the possibilities of his invention. Using 2,400 cards, each with about a thousand perforations, he managed to program a loom to produce its inventor’s portrait in black and white woven silk. The result was strikingly accurate and illusionistic. Even today, a jacquard is still the French name given to a pullover decorated with repetitive floral patterns.
Charles Babbage, in Jacquard’s day a mathematics professor at Cambridge and a member of the Royal Society, managed to lay hands on one of the silk portraits and became utterly fascinated by the possibility to fix instructions mechanically. He used the perforated card system to design an ‘Analytical Engine’, a machine that would be capable of performing sorts of symbolic operations mechanically, like a mathematical loom: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” As soon as the relationships between musical tones are described in formal laws, the Analytical Engine should be able to compose “elaborate and scientific pieces of music”.
Babbage didn’t really succeed in building an Analytical Engine, yet his designs represent a crucial link in the long and slow development that finally, in the middle of the 20th century, would lead to the actual construction of an automatic electronic machine with an internal program that could process symbols, in brief: the computer. Jacquard’s cardboard cards and the Analytical Engine were already characterized by the exact binary concept (perforated/not perforated, on/off, 1/0) that enables every digital program to process and store an huge amount of information.

Marcel Berlanger uses such procedures extensively. When creating — or should we rather say ‘constructing’ or ‘performing’— a painting, he seems to follow step by step a program that is determined beforehand and directed centrally, for example in the making of the Fumées. Berlanger draws an orthogonal grid over a photograph of his subject and transposes this grid— blown up x times — onto the canvas, in order to ‘colour’ the image square after square. What goes for the wisps of smoke — these apparently chaotic wisps are the result of a thoroughly disciplined and rational painting procedure — goes just as well for the marines. However ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ they may seem, the beholder who tends to be overwhelmed by romantic feelings, as if swept away by turbulent waters, should be warned in advance: below these surfaces, a similarly meticulously calculated grid is hidden.
In comparison to the large quantity of black and white paintings, the small, colourful, and abstract canvases look frivolous and cheerful. What actually has happened here is the combination of a tight lozenge grid with a blind arbitrariness in choosing colours and an obstinate repetition of the same painterly gesture. Due to their arbitrary colour combinations and the repetitive pattern, these paintings remind us somewhat of the art of the French painter Bernard Frize, with whom they share their predisposed procedure and their blind, mechanical execution.
For his Mont Ste-Victoire canvases, Berlanger simply turned the pages of a book on the Mont Ste-Victoire series by Paul Cézanne. Every single page of this book shows an image of a painting alongside a photograph of the landscape taken from the exact point of view where the French master has placed his easel. Starting from the painting and the photograph, Berlanger realized a series of reproductions (his paintings) of reproductions (the pictures in the book) of reproductions (Cézanne’s paintings and the photos). Simularly, his pictures of weeping willows, cypresses or chrysanthemums he steals from books: scientific publications offering a nice inventory of trees, plants, and flowers, classified and grouped into collections and series, depicted in a tight frame.
Marcel Berlanger usually paints on a support that the artist has developed himself: liquid resin, sometimes reinforced by glass fibre, is poured into a mould, so that the resulting support displays a tight, clear grid. Even when the surface has been painted, the texture of the support is still clearly visible, to an extent that the painting may have an aspect of a tapestry. More often still, canvases by Berlanger are mistaken for actual photographs. The fibre of the support evokes the knots of a carpet or the pixels of a digital photo, each filled up with a specific tone or colour value, carried out according to a simple binary logic. However abstract or void of substance each knot or pixel may be, hundreds of them together form patterns and figures, which — exactly like the mechanical self-portrait by Jacquard — the beholder experiences as a true-to-nature reproduction of a sensory reality perception.
Jacquard’s portrait and Marcel Berlanger’s canvases have quite a few aspects in common. On the one hand, they are obviously and clearly artificial and perfectly rational constructions, conceived of and executed in accordance with a program. On the other hand, this procedure results in images that induce the sweet taste of illusion in the beholder. Just what is it that turns a number of black and white squares into a recognizable and meaningful image?

This last question shifts our attention from the construction and internal logic of the image to its perception, i.e. the processes the image triggers in the beholder. Consequently, we come across fields like human perception and memory, processes like construction of image and meaning, and we ultimately even touch questions about the origins of language and image, of science and art. According to me, these are exactly the domains that Marcel Berlanger is exploring through his painting; Babbage and even Jacquard were dealing with the same concepts, albeit perhaps more implicitly or indirectly. After all, throughout the ages, devices that turned out to be capable of processing information or storing and conserving images, have each and every time served as a metaphor for processes in our brain - thus enabling us to do the same thing. In his book “De Metaforenmachine” the Dutch psychologist Douwe Draaisma describes how our memory, analogous to the technological evolution, has become consecutively a wax tablet, a book, a camera obscura, a loom, a photo camera or phonograph, and more recently, a computer, a hologram, or a neural network. Each new form of automatization revived the ancient alchemist dream of creating an artificial man or at least an artificial brain. In the 18th and part of the 19th century in particular, the belief in ‘l’homme machine’ was quite strong, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find that Jacquard and Babbage were convinced that the structure of the human brain was as clear and logical as an automatic loom or an Analytical Engine.
As for today, such research is principally situated in the realm of artificial intelligence. Pretty soon, however, they found that psychological processes are far less straightforward or rational than supposed in the first computer simulations. Thinking and reasoning, learning and recognising appear to be mosaic-like processes, where intuition and suspicions have just as much importance as logical deductions or statistically justified conclusions. If we compare the circuits of a normal computer — centrally directed to perform commands one by one — with human memory, the latter seems to deal with dozens of impulses at once, among which are smells, emotions, movements, sounds, ideas or sensations. The brain seems to have a network-like structure that manages to process all these stimuli not in a linear step-by-step way, but on the contrary simultaneously and associatively.

The essential difference between Jacquard’s portrait and a painting by Berlanger consists of the fact that the painter, even if he starts from a program as tight as the inventor’s, still creates all sorts of openings in order to allow the complexity and complications of images and their meaning, as described above, to creep into his work. For example, Berlanger often paints thinking about different possible ‘addressees’, i.e. people he knows well, but who all have completely different tastes, personalities or views on art. His purpose is that the painting complies with everyone’s wish, at the same time preventing the result from turning into a grey compromise. One of the techniques the painter regularly applies to achieve this difficult goal is the simultaneous use of different procedures or pictorial languages.
Some works, e.g. the marines, show a very subtle gradient from turquoise to mauve as an undercoat, a drawn orthogonal grid and the waves in a diagonal structure painted in black enamel: all these different pictorial means and languages flow together seamlessly and harmoniously. In other cases they manifest themselves as parallel yet, clearly diverse systems. Such is definitely the case when Berlanger uses the sprayer, be it to apply a lattice, or to spray paint all over the canvas in large circular movements, like a graffitist. The circular form contrasts with the explosive, aggressive structure of a serenoa palmetto. Both forms are in conflict yet strengthen each other. The black and white image is a realistic representation, whereas the spray painted circle has nothing to do with this kind of precise, photographic painting. It’s a sign, but one that doesn’t refer to anything, that is pure, physical expression, the capturing of a dancing motion, a gesture. Thus Berlanger introduces into his paintings not just aspects of other media, like photography and performance, he also juxtaposes diverse pictorial gestures, without one prevailing over the other, without the possibility of synthesis or mutual harmony. Exactly like in the canvases of the American painter Christopher Wool, the various pictorial means maintain their function as image ‘layers’ that are visually easy to separate. Consequently, the picture keeps unsettling the viewer; it never stops generating tensions and incidents. In that quality, according to Berlanger, lies the crucial distinction as to whether an image is granted artistic value or not: some images are entirely closed - past tense, dead - and so we can only take them or leave them, whereas other pictures allow all sorts of things to happen in the beholder’s perception: they are alive, here and now, tactile, real. However, it is very well possible that the image tricks the viewer on purpose: although we are convinced that the graffiti spray has been applied on top of the black and white image, the opposite is true.
There are quite a few more examples where Marcel Berlanger plays off diverse pictorial means, techniques, and languages against one another. Thanks to his further development of the support’s moulding technique, he has since become capable of leaving out the internal glass fibre reinforcement altogether, in order to obtain a transparent ‘canvas’ that isn’t displayed hanging on the wall, but in the middle of a room. Just like a medieval altarpiece, these paintings have a front, a back, and left and right hand sides, so that the viewers can walk around the work. The extremely important role the effects of light play in the appearance of the image, in making it vibrate as it were, reminds one of the perception of the images in a film. On the one hand these transparent paintings seem to dissolve into pure images; on the other hand they look quite concrete and tactile, due to their spatial presentation.
Another example of a manifest combination of diverse image systems is the series of Optotypes. Here we witness a number of letters classified in an apparently arbitrary order in about five lines. The characters are mirrored and gradually become larger or smaller, line-by-line and immediately remind us of a light box the ophthalmologist uses to test one’s eyesight. In some cases a portrait has been painted over the characters; in other works mere paint strokes seem to have been applied at random. The canvases have been constructed according to the moulding procedure Berlanger is familiar with. It is striking that the embossed letters are moulded. These comparatively small paintings constitute as it were a strange link between painting and sculpture, and they bring about even more confusion since they incite us both to read and to look. On the one hand, Berlanger's characters seem to suggest that each painting can be 'read', or that an image cannot be a pure reflection of a sensorial registration, but that it is always a set of coded meanings or representations. A portrait, for instance, is always strongly connected with the depicted person's name. On the other hand, since the characters are mirrored and have been applied in an arbitrary order, they have been freed from their referential function and it's their form, their pictorial value that becomes prevalent. The seemingly arbitrary paint strokes appear to be mirrored on both sides of an imaginary vertical axis, which is contradictory to their seemingly chaotic character. It reminds us of a psychological Rorschach test: ink poured onto a sheet of paper, which is folded, closed and opened again. The psychologist then asks the patient what he recognises in the resulting symmetrical pattern. This technique relates directly to the network-like structure of the brain, a network that consists of millions of basic, similar neurons. When certain neurons are activated together, for example when seeing a weeping willow, the network generates specific figures or patterns. Whenever a weeping willow appears on the retina again, a group of partly the same neurons will be activated and partially overlapping paths or patterns of connections between these neurons will be 'etched'. In the course of time these overlapping figures will turn into a prototype, so that every pattern that somewhat corresponds with it will from then on be recognised as a 'weeping willow-like figure'. This purely physical process, that teaches us to recognise and catalogue, develops automatically, without any central direction or coding from consciousness.lt belongs to the 'implicit', bodily part of our memory that consciousness has no control over. That is the reason why we keep being trapped by optical illusions, that we see images in a number of dots or a flock of birds, and that we have the irresistible urge to recognise words in a series of randomly placed characters. Besides, these processes also form the origin of every power of imagination and of every learning process.

A large weeping willow painting by Marcel Berlanger: one may consider it as a picture from a scientific catalogue, strictly ordered, classified, coded from within a univocal knowledge system. One reads the image as 'weeping willow', possibly followed by its exact Latin name, its family, its geographical distribution, etc. The painting may evoke such a context, but at the same time there are other references and associations, recollections, or sentiments, which a tree like that immediately evokes, and one understands that the painter brings them up on purpose. Apart from that, whenever you approach and move away from it again, the knot-Iike structure of the support of this rascal of a painting makes you experience over and over again the magic of appearance and the process of recognition.
I have been wondering what exactly turns a set of black or white cubes into a recognisable and meaningful image. The network-structure of the brain, generating prototypes without any intervention of the conscious mind, seems to hint at the solution. Douwe Draaisma points out that ultimately the question remains as to what the link is between those purely physical processes on the one hand, and the existence of a consciousness that converts the results of these processes into meaningful representations on the other hand In other words. who or what is in charge of the machinery, and interprets the results? In non-specialist literature, the brain is usually represented as a room where tiny men, so-called 'homunculi', operate the machines that are present - a camera, a computer, or a loom. It appears to me that Marcel Berlanger uses his pictures to aim at those industrious workers. He teases them, tickles them or irritates them, and puts them to work. To return now to his large weeping willow. wat he really means is "all hands on deck".