In a time – already a very extended time, one which even continues to bleed back into history as current practice finds “plagiarists avant le letter,” to appropriate the apt terminology of the OULIPO – when the distinction between abstraction and representation becomes less and less clear, or relevant, or desirable, the work of Christian Le Beuze Bastian strikes one as somehow representative.  Bastian’s forms are just that, (and in that, they partake in the Platonic).  They heighten the particular in a way that asserts its essence even while the underlying geometric or, perhaps more appropriately, physical, components of his forms emphasize their utter particularity.  One is reminded of the mature Cezanne or the wizened Matisse, both certainly presiding spirits in Bastian’s work.  Cezanne and Matisse, one before the question of abstraction had become a historical issue, the other when it had already become the most pressing question of the age (even if the dialectic was being played out viscerally in many of his contemporaries, again recapitulating in advance the quandary in which modern art found itself in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, and exemplified in the work of any number of the most fertile oeuvres of our lifetimes), were both profoundly engaged with forms, many of which happened also to be the forms of very particular “things,” and yet in ways that made it obvious that things in the world and things on the canvas, though historically, and perceptually, related, were in fact as magnificently unmoored from each other as words or music are from “external reality.”  The dawning of the consciousness that acts of the spirit are not subordinate to “facts” of the world has been a slow one.  While there is a thirst or need for a substrate, there is ultimately, only the most notional of relationships between the “real” and its incarnations in art of all types – a fact that has endured a very long, painful and continuing parturition in the modus most bound to the world at large.

The fact that Bastian often (obsessively) focuses on historical genres in which the tension between representation and essence, or abstraction, can be explicitly thematized, suggests, again in the mode of Cezanne and Matisse, a kind of painterly philosophizing, a philosophizing with the brush.  His subjects are conjurings with ideas that have provoked response from painters throughout modernity, and with the austerity of a Wittgenstein, he evokes new and intensely clarified visions from a world that had seemed to have become ordinary and unmysterious.