Jean Siméon Chardin - Singular banality

I often go to the Louvre, says Henri Matisse. I go there to study the technique of Chardin. He also made a copy of the Ray, just like his brothers Boudin and Soutine. About the Ray, Denis Diderot, who was full of criticism and supported Chardin without fail, said, It's disgusting, but it's the flesh of the fish, it's its skin, it's its blood. Yet it is Marcel Proust, whose writings on painting are among the most beautiful, who left the Ray a description that still sticks to his skin, if I dare say. Above you, a strange monster, as fresh as the sea where it drowned, a suspended Ray is open, and you can admire the beauty of its delicate and vast architecture, like the nave of a polychrome cathedral. But despite the strength of Proust's words, he does not reveal the mystery of Chardin, on the secret of this painter that no one has ever seen painting and who never wanted to reveal anything of his technique. Even the faithful Diderot went on to write that Chardin probably used as much of his thumb as of his brush. By the way, is there only one Chardin mystery? How could this painter, who was very much appreciated by his contemporaries, cross the centuries and maintain his singular aura to the point of being now unanimously considered as the first of the moderns among the ancients? What did the public of his time see in his work? How do we perceive it today? How is this work so modern? At first glance, nothing but very banal, indeed. Usual objects reproduced without artificial staging, without pathos, without apparent emotion. So why does his painting move us so much? For its literality, perhaps. Showing us a daily life without telling us anything about it, Chardin somehow forces us to find a meaning to his painting in the painting itself rather than to its periphery, as we do too often. Better than imitating reality, art offers us the means to carry on it a new look, says Chardin, through objects restored in all their physical presence. But if this possibility is clear about the modernity of his painting, it only offers a wrong answer to the silent emotion that grips us in front of a painting by Chardin. A statement that the painter gave to his engraver may tell us better about him than all speculations would. I must forget everything I have seen, even the way in which these objects have been treated by others. By this requirement, which means that a dead nature of Chardin does not resemble a dead nature of a young master of the Dutch golden age, the painter captivates us, as a Giorgio Morandi will later captivate us with less technique but more sobriety. And then there is this white, this white so mastered that all the other colors seem to merge to converge better towards it. But here again it is a bit short, because seeing his view weaken, Chardin will leave the oil for the pastel, and in doing so, he will revolutionize the art of the portrait as he had revolutionized that of the dead nature. What more brilliant, indeed, than these two self-portraits of great nature, removed with a teenage fuga, where his virtuosity so well completes his sensitivity? So I'm going to risk a necessarily incomplete answer. The mystery of Chardin is that of his timelessness, which can be just as much the result of chance as of talent. For his contemporaries, he was in all humility the painter of everyday life and intimacy, far from the overwhelming sentimentalism of Ingres, for example. For his aficionados of the 19th century, he was the psychologically sharp witness of a revolutionary era, therefore idealized. And for his admirers of the 20th century, he was the initiator of all future geometries, of cubism in particular. To which it should be added that his technique, without effect, out of fashion, which guarantees him of never being out of fashion.