Armande Reymond  Luc Joly, your work consists of the imaginary, bits and pieces of castoffs, strong lines, wild animals, objects you bend and make dovetail with each other; it comprises net supports turned into volumes, multifaced paintings. What is at the source of such pictorial abundance: would you say it is a search for materiality, for imagery?

Luc Joly  It's a game, a trip... I have always enjoyed drawing, playing around with strokes, with lines. Evenings at home we often used to play at turning scribbles into something intelligible. One of us would start a drawing and then pass it on to the next person, who would in turn add further elements. And so on, until whatever we scribbled turned into something recognizable. It was a game we really loved because it stimulated our imagination and memory.
In high school I discovered geometry was an easy subject for me. Later on, once I'd finished my fine arts schooling, and although the idea didn't particularly appeal to me, I was posted to teach that reputedly grim subject at Geneva's School of Applied Arts. The fact that my job somewhat weighed on me notwithstanding, actually I was lucky to find myself located in such an extremely creative atmosphere. It was a place where the imaginary could draw on all sorts of technological opportunities: the resulting imagery generously reflected those many possibilities.
After teaching for around ten years, more and more I came to question imagery and its limitations. For example, I would ask myself, why is it we can read photographs so easily? Why are photographic images almost always limited by rectangular supports? Moreover, I came to see that linear elements and the gesture of painting are ambiguous since, on the one hand, they fashion a shape, an image, while on the other hand, they lead their own lives. Hence, they can suffice unto themselves. It's simple enough to imagine a painting as nothing but brush strokes existing independently of what they're meant to represent. My questioning, as fascinating as it was, did not however induce me to completely banish all reference to reality. I still consider reality as basic to any form of expression.

A. R.  Why is it you question imagery and its limitations?

L. J.  I guess part of the answer has to do with my childhood games, with the fact that I was in contact with artistic professions, and with my job teaching geometry. Those are factors that got me thinking all about imagery, the written message. Actually, there's nothing very unusual about such an approach. In order to express themselves, all artists are stimulated one way or another by what they see of reality. No one creates out of nothing.

A. R.  Your early works - landscapes, still lifes, self-portraits, portraits - are extremely classical. They don't seem to have much to do with your plastic considerations concerning imagery and its supports...

L. J.  I remain a firm believer in a basic classical training: it provides the artist with a background of solid premises and arguments. The past is charged with forces. We should make use of those forces, but surpass them. And when we question classical modes of expression, we get a better understanding of their contemporary counterparts. I believe in the kinship between kinds and fashions, just as there is an ascendancy between races and cultures.

A. R.  Certain themes appear rather frequently in your work, for instance women. Is that a coincidence or is it intentional?

L. J.  Being a man, I have what I consider normal appetites. Actually, the subject matter doesn't matter all that much to me. I use it as a pretext to find answers to my questions concerning the problematical aspects of imagery. Instead of referring to women, I might just as well paint an imaginary animal, or something else. All I want is for whatever I am expressing to represent a challenge because it requires a new form of expression.

A. R.  Don't you think that you surpass, perhaps unconsciously, whatever you use as a mere pretext? I mean, if one considers the wealth of figures peopling your work, one could imagine you seek to elaborate an oeuvre on a mythological scale ?

L. J.  It seems to me my inclination is to surround myself with animated creatures. If I were to rank my preferences, I would put landscapes based on nature at the bottom of the list, considering them as places to visit but not to paint. Quite to the contrary, the very first object crafted by the hand of Man already can move me, because it's something that has its place in the world of creativity. And any animal at all is more interesting than objects, since it's something alive. So, in the last analysis, I would put human beings at the top of my list; playing with my fellow men, living amongst them, is my top priority.

A. R.  Yet to me, it seems your favorite vocabulary has to do with animals. Your creatures are able to transform your works of art into a huge theater of images without losing their own identity.

L. J.  True enough, many of my creatures look strange. But I hate horror films or science fiction. My animals - some horned or adorned with bird combs - are nigh to harmless. They're nothing but imps. I really do not enjoy the kind of anxiety inspired by horror books, films or plays. There's enough dramatic tension to Life itself. On another hand, I am not at all attracted by the affected mode of sentimental themes. The bottom line is that I need subjects, shall we say pretexts for imagery, that are legible and, in some cases, that have a spirit or a spiritual resonance to them.

A. R.  Are you trying to challenge the reality of our world?

L. J.  No... I challenge the translation of that reality into images. Certain facts, notions, senses - like sight, touch, and so forth - are simply inescapable. We are confronted by universal realities, and it is precisely at the point of confrontation that I seek to understand how certain givens are transcribed into images and thus made to lead a life of their own.
If we consider various important stages in the history of art, we can see that artists have worked hard to achieve realistic and optical representation. Yet despite their determination to remain close to reality, each one of them does add his personal way of seeing the object under observation. In doing so, each one reveals his own writing and projects an intimately personal approach.
Such a personal manner of transcribing a given subject lends itself to a multitude of reflections to do with the theme being handled, the work's visual quality, the originality or novelty of its conception. I myself am particularly interested in the question of supports, and tend to inquire into their nature and shape to the very limit of the possible. They are akin to sculpture as soon as you paint on a board or canvas, you realize that you can continue onto the back of it, or even along its edges. If the support has bulk to it, the image drifts over onto other parts of the support, as if seeking to make a conquest of unexplored regions.
So my images veer towards sculpture, since my preference is for any support that goes beyond being just a surface plane. That's what led me in particular to create foldable sculptures that are articulated around the components of one same subject.

A. R.  How do you go about making your "sculpture- paintings"? Do you make a quick preliminary sketch of them to understand their development ? Or perhaps make a scale model of them ?

L. J.  No, I make no attempt at them beforehand, because I don't want to risk imposing any restrictions to their freedom. Images crop up in unexpected forms; they should determine their own selves, in adjustment with the outline being drawn up, and with the shape and nature of the support involved. I always trust instinct over thinking, because I feel that there is more truth to intuition than to reasoning. The emotions involved must be preserved. If I did do any preliminary sketches, then they themselves would be a true reflection, the act of creating.

A. R.  How do you choose the materials to use as supports?

L. J.  Prosaically enough, what really matters more than the choice of materials is the amount of time available. The quality, the intensity of my reactions depends on that single factor, all the rest ties in with it as naturally as can be.
The technical possibilities in our day and age are endless. Any time I come across paint sticking to some material that hasn't been tried out yet, I immediately experiment with that material in order to discover how its specific nature interacts with paint, how it's going to affect my image. For instance, watercolor is seldom applied to glazed bristol board because the water runs all over the place and the whole thing seems like a flop. Yet despite its apparent faults, the result represents the discovery of a novel approach.
Beside all the experimenting I do, my classical fine arts background stands me in good stead. It means I never give a thought to a possibly negative outcome. Instead, I'm like an acrobat who has been so well trained for his role that he's willing to try out a new tightrope without any specia training.
Anyway, to get back to the question of my choice of materials, I really like cardboard, because you can find it anywhere. And it has the additional advantage of its stiffness, so it can act as its own support. It's a material you can bend: my image- sculptures, my paradoxical objects, are almost all out of painted cardboard. Cardboard that has been discarded, that has already led a life, is undoubtedly the most apt to have a future to it...

A. R.  Paralleling your work as a painter, you are the author of two books: "Structure", which is a dictionary of geometrical terms, and "Shapes and Signs" in which, within the framework of Man's first language, you analyze the meaning of shapes. What room would you say those two books take up in your sphere of creativity?

L. J.  The fact that I was obliged to teach geometry incited me to delve into that subject and to enrich it. As an avid reader, I discovered that in anthropo- logy, for example, there exist basic structures that are not specific to a particular culture. It's important to be familiar with them. A great many signs are in fact immutable archetypes. And in the field of epistemology, one learns that the various stages of development belonging to different civilizations can be applied as well to development on an individual scale. Now we ourselves belong to a particular civilization - I mean Western civilization - that is supposedly in advance of other civilizations. So, by observing what signs and images are being used by individuals here and now, we have an exciting opportunity to guess which ones lie ahead in the future for Everyman.

A. R.  Do you consider artificial images as part of your answer?

L. J.  If there is such a thing as "artificial images", then they are above all a direct reflection of our big-city lifestyle. They reflect the fact that we have forgotten all the natural archetypes, that we are regularly confronted with an overload of basically publicity- oriented and generally aggressive imagery. So I'm inclined to think it's vital for us today to reestablish a certain equilibrium, because excess tends to inebriate us. All the repetitiousness, the televisual litanies, knock us out. We should banish that kind of - in the words of Marshall McLuhan - "brain massaging" from our minds.

A. R.  With all that in mind, what road do you intend to follow to stay more or less sober?

L. J.  Well, I'm a mere entity, one single person, just like everybody else. I try to discover what I'm composed of, who I am. I have to define myself, to find out where I belong in this world, what role is mine. And by doing so, I am getting closer to whatever seems to me to be universal - perhaps understandable and even useful - for each one of us.

A. R.  Indeed, there is something very universal about the way you avail yourself of certain signs, like triangles, circles, squares...

L. J.  It's impossible to escape the basic elements belonging to the scheme of things, even if we do tend to forget them. Nothing can be built without them. As reference points, they invite us - more or less consciously - to continue developinq their structures.

A. R.  Your urge to conduct experiments using images and their supports has often incited you to organize or propose various public cultural events. Putting up prints on billboards is one of the activities I have in mind.

L. J.  Those different activities have given me a chance to explore new borderlines to be transcribed or to keep up with what is evolving in the way of contemporary imagery. When I sought to cover all of Switzerland with posters in 1986, the idea was to give poetic imagery a chance to be visually present all over the country by pasting it on billboards. I couldn't carry the project through all the way because of certain local (by cantons) restrictions. But the project still exists in Geneva; the billposting committee allots ten of the city's billboards for prints.

A. R.  Since 1985, you have teamed up with the French writer Michel Butor to carry out a serie of dialogues in words and images. How do you two work out your projects together?

L. J.  Michel Butor does not like to have his own texts illustrated, but he does enjoy adding words to other people's illustrations. So I make a whole lot of images available to him. Once he's touched them up with words or phrases, I go back over his writing with strokes and colors. I add a few dabs, shapes, signs, even some false texts meant to confirm or challenge the sense of our joint work.
We take turns interfering with a piece several times, and end up discovering unexpected meanings. Experimenting even more boldly, we work on barely sketched images; in those cases, the meaning of Michel Butor's words induces even more obvious plastic complements.

A. R.  You might say you have recaptured the "intelligible scribbles" game of your childhood...

L. J.  Our collaboration is very fulfilling since it involves a confrontation between two kinds of expression. Michel Butor prefers the rhythmical and structural aspects of a text when he sees an image, he fills it with words and sentences and thus makes the sense, rhythm and phonemes respond to each other. The colors and shapes I use incite him to travel ever further out, towards an heretofore unknown universe.
So our dialogues are composed of several layers of execution and readings. A particular image we have taken turns working on for a number of times provides us with successive bits of information that go beyond the first reading or visualization. Our construction game constantly implies availing ourselves of illusions, of allusions, and of our memory; it inspires developments that remain unpredictable with respect to the work's thematic content and its plasticity.