« Now that the mirror is broken, it is time for the shards to start reflecting. »
Ingmar Bergman, Hour of the Wolf

 « I don't think you have to seek in order to find. »
Eric Dolph

Compulsive mania ? Internal decongestion ? Painful distortions of a deviant imagination ? A spirit of enraged regression? No. Just a huge appetite for forms, born out of what Henri Michaux called «the adventure of being alive». In this sense, Christian Lhopital's drawings are endlessly astounding, stunning, fascinating. The unstable magnetic field in which they proliferate, replicate, oscillate or vibrate like tuning forks leaves neither the eye nor the tongue unstimulated.

Our contemporaries have generally regarded drawing as entertainment for the hoi polloi, or at best a bizarre form of courage. Lhopital has practised it faithfully since 1976. Back then, ballpoint pens and pad in hand, he was delving (if unwittingly) into something like Sigmar Polke's formal derelictions.

But unlike Polke, Lhopital has not needed rat poison or hair remover to feed his discipline. The toxic aspect of his material comes from throwing perception into a panic as it tries to get its bearings in this space on paper with its indistinct horizons and three-tier structure.

Three levels, three stopping points for the eye. This scalar hierarchy gets us straight to the heart of the matter. I spontaneously associate it with the Greek funerary vases that were made in Miletus, Chios and Rhodes five centuries before the modern era, with their epic compositions arranged in superimposed registers.

In Lhopital's case, however, «Graecism» would be tantamount to «error»1. The ruler and compass, the diagonals and golden sections of the Attic clarity whose aim was to present the world in perspective have no place in his work. His arrangements of planes bear little relation to the ancient precedent, though it has to be said that his graphic conceptions, with their power of circulation, emancipation and interference, force the eye into mobility and the retina into a search for a route through labile scenes representing no identifiable location. Nowhere in Lhopital's series does one see the sameness of a regular rhythm that could found a recognisable location...

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... What is the status of the Lhopitalian image ? His line sometimes takes on the qualities of an opium dream, and it makes sense to talk about his work in the context of violent inner experiences that awaken something in the depths of the psyche.

Are they imaginary images or unimaginable images, these representations that do not seem capable of materialisation ? For Lhopital, drawing is also a specular enterprise that comes across as a reality transfer of the most direct kind.

In his field of vision, form suddenly becomes feeling, and he propagates his images into it. A group of teenagers in a railway station reminds him of a Caravaggio ; an unusual pose redefines a child trying to keep a pushchair in place in a bus ; and all of a sudden, a photo-optical mind-machine starts up. In an inexhaustible flux of transit points, Lhopital pins down reality in the raw movement of life, derisory or eloquent, that bursts out and then blends into free associations between subject matter and eye.

Lhopital's fantasy images are induced. They come to us from unmediated visual experience, inviting us not to go delirious, but to perceive. And it may well be that a number of them are in circulation within the social body. Some of his monsters do not have zippers in their backs, which proves that they are all too real, that they are lurking somewhere in the world's optical subconscious, and that the distinction we steadfastly maintain between the real and the imaginary does not always suffice to render them invisible.

Lhopital thus attracts to himself images that duplicate (or do not duplicate) the sensorial appearances from which they have been wrenched. Condensed onto the point of a needle, they invoke the commotion that will bring them looming up, mutant, onto the sheet of paper. And as mutants, they derive from a type of experience in which the notions of «inner» and «outer» have given way to a much more all-enveloping perception of reality. They have their own mode of operation, in their formal and symbolic relationships.
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