ZILON - Download PDF here

The necessary breath

Like a knife to the throat. Planted quick.  Slack. To fall into Zilon’s pictorial universe is to be pulled from slumber with the strength of a rainstorm.  We are dealing with this psychic journey of pain transformed into beauty. And beauty, in Zilon’s case, is dangerous. It is not the magnificent pristine beach, it is not this tourist attraction, it is on the contrary this looming storm in the distance, in the horizon, amongst the deep waves. Zilon is a painter in the same way that some others are solitary navigators. He invites us to a beauty where a pulse is mandatory. Where the distance of the shore is imperative. He distances himself from the coast to find himself in the heart of the storm. Zilon is there. The paper is soiled. The painting is sensual, made from spit and tears, made from strong strokes and from rage to concealed sadness. Color that screams. Always the same, like a voice that aches to be heard.

Although, sometimes, silence arrives. We stay before the canvas. The painting is there. Vibrant. We cannot help but think that we are on the moon and that what we see before us is a dry landscape, a burnt earth, blue is this dry land, this burnt earth is nothing short of ourselves. Zilon is not an egotistical painter. He is a revealing painter. He reveals the bruised and pained within all of us. This contrasts starkly with the softness of the gazes. The eyes, where Zilon is concerned, save us from the apocalypse. They are a form of consolation. The gaze, though it seeks to be hard, is never unforgiving. To think that Zilon is not able to paint the look of viciousness. We paint what we know. Viciousness does not exist in this poetic universe. The eyes scream until they are out of breath, the need for friendship, for love screams and shouts and agitates the heart with an immobile trance.

Zilon is a musical painter, in the way that some painters are dancers. Music is a backdrop. We must hear it in order to enter into these paintings. The music is not necessarily loud. On the contrary. The music is muffled.  Heavy. Almost imperceptible, but not atmospheric. Almost repetitive. To look at these paintings with this music, we can, I think, approach Zilon’s spirit when Zilon is holding the paintbrush.

Like a knife to the throat.  Planted hard. Slack. It it sometimes hard to continue breathing. Painting, to Zilon, is breathing. It alternates between pain and beauty. Inhale. Exhale.

One day, I was walking in the Mont-Royal cemetery. Thousands of gravestones were emerging from the ground like hands reaching for the sky. Most of them were enormous, spectacular. I was walking there by chance. I was walking without looking. After a few hours of wandering, I sat down. Just by my side, there was an old gravestone shaped like a cross. Made of white granite. It was broken and was laying by the base of the tomb where it was once erected. At the center of the cross, someone had drawn a face. I immediately recognized Zilon’s gaze. It was the tomb of a child. The name had been erased. With this face, Zilon had once again given it a memory. It was there that I understood the magnitude of the generosity, the humility and the genius of the artist, Van Gogh little brother, living on the other side of the century.

By Wajdi Mouawad