Cronos 12 1982

Curator: First impressions: it feels so ethereal, almost like looking at a nebula of spilled wine. Editor: Indeed. We’re looking at René Duvillier's “Cronos 12,” painted in 1982. It seems the artist employed watercolour on paper to capture this fluid abstraction. Curator: "Fluid" is the perfect word. There's this lovely diffusion of pigment creating these ambiguous shapes…it’s as though I’m observing an idea slowly coalescing into form. It’s dreamy, and has this organic energy. Editor: Absolutely. The use of watercolor bleed certainly enhances the sense of organic movement and transformation. It calls to mind the concepts tied with the name Cronos, where time can simultaneously create and destroy. Notice the concentration of crosshatched dark pigment on one edge which contrasts the ephemeral washes surrounding it. The density emphasizes texture that appears like some sort of vital essence or seed. Curator: Yes, exactly! A core that feels alive. And look at how that denser patch is also the source from which the more diluted washes radiate out, like a memory dispersing, or…an unfolding potential. Does the off-white paper substrate symbolize innocence, as Cronos's infanticidal rage goes onto the canvas? Editor: Perhaps Duvillier intended it as an element of primordial beginnings or potential that pre-exists color in a structural sense, though the relationship to such symbolisms remains necessarily speculative. Even so, what intrigues me is not merely symbolic or emotional expression, but rather that there seems a concentrated exploration into medium, allowing properties intrinsic to watercolour dictate and ultimately define the image. Curator: You’re right; the watercolour has been allowed to bloom, bleed, do its thing…giving agency to the medium, as though Duvillier were a mere conduit. That makes me consider more about creative powerlessness in the face of grand cosmic movements and processes like Cronos...It is truly amazing. Editor: Precisely. In studying Cronos 12 through medium properties and elemental formal considerations, its impact has caused our understandings about nature, artistic interpretation and expression to evolve during our analysis. It has proven itself. Curator: Yes, and perhaps by giving ourselves over to the flow and mutability inherent in watercolour we come to perceive such works from points in art's history and practice in profounder ways.