Translated by Jessica Moore. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. 240 pages. $27.00.
Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time is a novel about becoming an artist. At first the novel seems like a classic kunstlerroman, with three young artists meeting in a Paris bar wearing their highly intentional clothes: tight pants, vintage boots, distressed Yankees cap. They could be at a casting call for a Sally Rooney novel. One, Paula Karst, is back from Moscow; the others want to know of her “conquests” and “exploits.” But the novel is at heart about appearances, how they can deceive but also how that deception can be virtuous.
The three are not capital ‘A’ artists; Paula did not just sell a painting/sculpture/installation/vivisected sheep in formaldehyde to a Russian oligarch. They are graduates of Institute de Peinture, an art school entirely devoted to trompe l’oeil. Specifically painting techniques that create the impression of rare and expensive interior design elements: tropical hardwoods and heritage marbles. The course is rigorous, physical even, as the students are asked to cover wall-sized panels with intricate patterns. More stinking, the painting is demandingly uncreative. On good days the students feel like copyists, on bad days charlatans.
Taking this niche practice as her subject fits de Karangal’s style, which is more novel-as-essay than novel-novel. Her previous books The Cook and The Heart are lyric meditations on process. They have a near obsessive attention to how people interact with objects and how that shapes existence. The Heart, a story of a transplant, is originally titled Réparer les vivants, a phrase borrowed from Chekov. When asked what can be done after tragedy, Chekov’s character replies: Bury the dead and mend the living. Doing, rather than any spiritual or emotional work, is the source of healing. In Painting Time, Paula takes a humiliating job painting the ceiling of her neighbor’s nursery. Her parents, bourgeois professionals, think her time would be better spent pursuing another degree, this time in fine arts. But the experience of doing does it for Paula:
The bedroom is converted into a basket of a hot air balloon, into a yurt on the plains, a rock shelter, and when Paula finally steps down to the floor, swaying, drained, and announces she’s finished, the young mother comes into the room and lets out a cry, bites her lips in amazement, and her hand flutters about in the air as if stung by a wasp. Paula, on the other hand, can’t even look at her work anymore […] maybe if she lifts her eyes toward the ceiling she won’t be able to recognize herself as the author of that blue, and would be uneasy to observe an unknown presence within the same body as her: did I paint that?
When she crosses back to her parent’s apartment, she announces she won’t be going back to school. Her father asks, “I thought you wanted to be a painter?” Paula responds, “I want to paint, that’s all.”
Paula joins a class of itinerant craftspeople, mostly painting soundstages across Europe. She is never quite free of the self-abnegating feeling that she is not a real artist, that her work is derivative rather than expressive. But mostly she and her friends from the Institue de Peinture are fine. There are enough rich people who want their foyer lined with Italian Portoro Nero marble but don’t want to spring for the actual stuff. At times, they come off as shallow: their clothes are cool, their casual sex is cool, they use too many exclamation points. They are unreflective of both their relative privilege and the debasement of labor in a neoliberal society. On the plus side though, not one of them believes an MFA from NYU will fix these things.
All the while, de Karangal moves Paula closer to her preordained purpose. Karst is both Paula’s last name and the process of rock dissolution, the means by which caves are formed. While the caves of the Dordogne are not karst formations, the poetic logic of the text dictates that our protagonist finds herself involved in the most ambitious unoriginal painting project undertaken: Lascaux IV. Lascaux IV is the most complete recreation of the cave famous for Paleolithic masterpieces. The original cave has been closed to the public since 1963 as the introduction of fungi and lichen by the crowds eager to take in the mysteries of their distant ancestors began to degrade the images themselves. Since that time, reproductions of parts of the cave have been offered as substitute. Lascaux IV is the final and most ambitious of these reproductions, recreating nearly the entire cave using laser modeling. Clearly, this is the height of Paula’s craft, to copy and thereby preserve. Her cohort of “Bamboozlers of the real, traffickers of fiction” is there to perform the most virtuous of tricks, to bridge the present with the timeless through art.
This is the heart of the novel, and it sings with de Karangal’s love of process, of losing yourself by being in the world. Cave paintings, after all, were not born of individual expression, were not to be consumed in museums and galleries. They were, as far as we know, not consumed at all. It is a model of creativity outside contemporary understanding of the individual artist, even outside decorative religious art. We don’t know what role painting played twenty-five thousand years ago, but we do know nomadic groups returned to the same cave sites over the course of millennia, with some caves showing sporadic contributions over a period longer than recorded history. This relationship to time, and to a largely anonymous human continuum, is at the core of de Karangal’s theory of art. What if you painted a bull on a cave wall and nobody saw it for two thousand years, and nobody would know it was you who painted it? Would you still paint it? De Karangal is interested in the artist who would say yes. At the novel’s conclusion, she gives a vision of what that assent looks like:
And then, caught in the ray of the projector filtered through the luminous reproduction of photography, spun with furrows and lighter veins, integrated into the flat surfaces of the painting, herself furrowed with the underground rivers, with dark galleries and ornamented rooms, Paula melts into the image, prehistoric and parietal.
That last word evokes both the cave walls that host the paintings and the lobe of the brain that is responsible for visuospatial processing and hand-eye coordination. In other words, both where the paintings are made and how they are made. It entirely bypasses the question of who makes them, which is the point.