On analyzing the biography of Louis Cattiaux written by Bernard Dorival on the occasion of the first exhibition of his complete works, we find an interesting reference: «1936. A period of searching begins for him: his concerns over technique are combined with an orientation towards Alchemy and the Quest for the Absolute, which will renew his subjects».
From that point on, his paintings directly reflect this concern; he leaves behind his formative and experimental period, the most important events of which were the creation, in 1933, of an avant-garde art gallery, called Gravitations, and the foundation, together with a small group of painters and poets, of an ephemeral artistic movement that they dubbed Transhylisme: attempts to play a part in the frantic quest for the art of the century. But from 1936 onwards his painting becomes more personal, and it is difficult to include it fully in any of the contemporary tendencies of pictorial art. Some critics included it in surrealism, and indeed, we must not forget that Cattiaux lived and worked in the physical and temporal epicentre of the movement led by André Breton.
The paintings of Louis Cattiaux certainly have something of the surrealistic about them. Within his canvases there lives a strange, magic world, different from what our eyes see in the everyday world. Something similar to what the surrealists sought on investigating little-known areas of the human spirit, remote from logic and reason. In his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton wrote: «Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain point of the spirit at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived in contradictory terms. Thus, it is futile to seek in surrealist activity any other motive but the hope of determining that point».
Surrealism opened the door of art towards the darker areas of the human spirit, but, undoubtedly, once that threshold had been crossed, the majority of the artists of the time managed only to extract personal styles; aesthetically interesting as these were, very few succeeded in distinguishing the light of the spirit that germinates in the midst of the regions of dusk and darkness. As though once outside the rational world, at the «point of the spirit at which life and death» meet, the quest would dissolve into an inevitable twilight, into illusions of ideas and feelings.
With regard to the surrealist painters, Cattiaux wrote: «they have used trompe-l’oeil and seem to take their inspiration from the scenes of madness of the underground chamber of the Great Pyramid». Here, he was undoubtedly alluding to the problem expressed by Sybill to the pious Aeneas, when the latter wanted to go down to Hades: «[…] the descent to the Averno is easy. The gate of sombre Pluto is wide open day and night, but to retrace your steps and emerge once more in the sweet air of life, that’s the hard part, there’s the risk. A small few […] managed it».
In Cattiaux’s work, the images deriving from the world removed from consciousness are not oneiric, automatic, paranoiac or naïve images, nor aggravated feelings; nor do they permit an expressiveness of suggestive and exotic beauty; rather, they are symbols of the world of light that is engendered in darkness, that «springs from the darkness of the hidden being».
Analyzing the subjects of Louis Cattiaux’s paintings from the mentioned change in 1936, we notice that, together with the dissolution of apparent reality – as we find in the surrealists –, there emerges a world of symbols that reflect the legacy of Western sacred art. This characteristic clearly distinguishes his painting from the surrealist tendencies, and Cattiaux himself finds it necessary to clarify the matter in a letter: «art enthusiasts classify my work as surrealism, which for them is a catch-all term for everything they are unable to understand».
HERMETIC ART
The symbolic images that stand out most in the pictorial art of our artist are those that are closely related to hermetic art. This was confirmed by René Guénon, who wrote of Cattiaux’s Rediscovered Message (an opinion that is equally valid for his paintings): «the tendencies expressed in it are, in general, those of hermeticism and, more specifically, those of Christian hermeticism».
It is not easy here to summarize the meaning of hermetic art, nor to identify its boundaries, although undoubtedly, and most importantly, it is directly related to alchemy. In Cattiaux’s work we find continual references to the alchemic art, which he calls «the ancient Royal Art of the Sages». His paintings and drawings are replete with alchemic signs showing the elements with which this art works, and describing its operations: he paints characters receiving the dew of heaven, atanors and flasks, bodies germinating from their tombs, magicians holding up the stone, tigers crowned by the sun, and so on.
Alchemy is, according to Cattiaux, the golden key for interpreting all the symbols, and of course, the key to his paintings. E. and C. d’Hooghvorst explain that this art «unites heaven and earth and refers to the mystery of God, of creation and of man», so that the alchemic meaning links the terrestrial senses: moral, philosophical and ascetic, with the heavenly ones: cosmogonic, mystic and initiatic. Cattiaux expresses it in the following way: «alchemy is not the yoga of the West; it is the primary and ultimate science, the science of the renovation of creation, the mystery of mysteries […]. But it also contains a trap for the greedy and the brutish». The trap consists in confusing the symbols that explain the secrets of nature with the secrets themselves, for, as the alchemist Geber wrote: «The ancients hid the secrets of Nature not only in writings, but also by means of numerous images, characters, numbers, monsters and animals represented and transformed in a variety of ways. And inside their palaces and temples they painted these poetic legends, the planets and the celestial signs, with many other signs, monsters and animals. And they were understood by none but those who possessed knowledge of such secrets».
Hermetic art, like the work of Cattiaux, reveals, but also hides, gives a thousand names and figures to its sole matter: the gift of heaven, without which the alchemic work cannot begin. H. C. Agrippa wrote of this First Matter: «There is a thing created by God, the subject of great admiration, which is on earth and in heaven, exists in the animal, vegetable and mineral act, is found in all places, is unknown, which nobody calls by its name, but which is concealed under names, figures and enigmas, and without which neither Alchemy nor natural Magic could have imposed themselves».
The First Matter is also known by the name of Mercury, god of the word. Cattiaux devoted a painting to this subject, The Rural Mercury (Figure 1); on the back of the canvas the artist wrote the following dedication: «For C. H., this Mercury that leads to the Sun born again, which is celebrated at this Christmas of 1952». The painting shows Mercury between the Sun and the Moon, for, as is written on the famous Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, «the Sun is his father and the Moon his mother»; likewise, Horapollo of the Nile explains that the Egyptians «to indicate eternity draw a sun and a moon because they are eternal elements». The figure of Mercury is wearing a large hat, which indicates that he represents a hidden thing, with his hands covered by gloves, symbol of purity. He holds a wand that bears the Sun and the Moon, symbols of eternity; with the other hand he holds up an allegorical figure of the Philosopher’s Stone. The fact of being called «rural» may be related to the appearance of the First Matter, which is a «rough and raw» thing that must be cultivated and must mature to become transformed into the Philosopher’s Stone.
In Cattiaux’s pictorial work we can equally find constant reference to the great themes of Christianity: the Annunciation, the Virgin, the birth of Jesus, images of the crucifixion, the disciples of Emmaus, the last judgement… Each one of these paintings represents a profound reflection and a teaching on Christian iconography as it was at its origin. The evangelical teachings are dealt with from the knowledge of the secret they conceal, since «thanks to the light of the holy science of Hermes» – as Cattiaux explained to a friend – «you shall penetrate little by little the mysterious and hidden meaning of the life and passion of the Lord Christ».The canvas entitled The True Mystery of the Passion (Figure 2) is, as we understand it, a magnificent example of this. It represents the crucifixion, but in a completely different way from conventional images: the figure of the crucified man is marked only by a hollow in the timber; in the part corresponding to the face we can see the Sun, which, in turn, is crowned by the Moon. The union of the cross, the Sun and the Moon forms the hieroglyphical symbol for the mercury of the sages. Pernety tells us that, according to the hermetic philosophers, the mercury of the sages «is at the same time the medicine of the three kingdoms, or its universal panacea that revives the dead».
In his later paintings, Cattiaux devoted special attention to the representation of the Virgin; in reference to this, he said «I paint Eternal Virgins of whom nobody knows the true name except he who marries them». According to Cattiaux, the Marian mystery, so ignored and discredited in our times, is the place through which one must necessarily pass in order to reach the philosophical sun, and his artistic creations on this topic, far removed from aesthetic concerns, are specific teachings on this mystery: The Fecundation of the Virgin, The Black Virgin, Maria Paritura, The Solar Virgin, and so on.
In the last years of his life, captivated more and more by the marvels of the sacred reality he knew, his thoughts and his creations left behind definitively what we consider as the world and trends of art. His works, remote from the flow of the everyday world, are testimony to he «who is, who lives, who remains immutable in himself for eternity».
TECHNIQUE AS THE FOUNDATION OF THE SPIRIT
Leaving aside historical, aesthetic and thematic considerations, of fundamental importance in the work of Cattiaux is materiality. According to E. d’Hooghvorst, Louis Cattiaux «painted using rich, dense, intensely coloured material. He claimed to have rediscovered the secret of the old matter used by the Van Eyck brothers, that professional secret that the painters of old passed down by word of mouth from master to pupil». The secret of his technique focused on the preparation of a medium, permanent and transparent, as a vehicle for his pigments, embalming them to protect them from oxidization and separating them to permit the light to reach the white backgrounds, from which the mass of colour would be illuminated, producing the «vibrato» of which he speaks in his essay. In this way, the supernatural appears hidden in the natural reality. This is undoubtedly why his essay on painting is entitled The Physics and Metaphysics of Painting – that is, from the physical reality we reach the metaphysical reality. His art is born in the bowels of this world and rises towards the other world. In his essay he writes: «It is commonly said that genius is sublime; we prefer to say that it is sublimated». This clarification seems to indicate that the work of art emerges from the darkness of this world to reach the celestial light. In Cattiaux’s painting, material becomes as though alive, and is transformed into the necessary root where the spirit flourishes.
The medium used by Cattiaux for producing his serene and enigmatic paintings also has the aim of the magical apprehension of the living spirit of the universe, for without it, he explains, it is not possible for the supernatural light concealed in the natural reality to appear. In his paintings and writings we find constant reference to magic, for without it, art would not exist. As Cattiaux explains in his essay: «The origin of art is not the result of an aesthetic necessity, as it is generally thought, but rather of a need for magical domination».
Thanks to the influence of heaven, apprehended magically, Louis Cattiaux’s paintings did not remain locked in the world of the surrealist subconscious, but instead reflect the secrets of life; in this regard, he writes « I like most of all to paint imaginary characters in invented landscapes, but above everything else is the magical quest that is so disturbing because of the so-secret expression of life».
In the small painting entitled The Force of the Pentacles or the Celestial Venus; The Mother of the Worlds (3), Cattiaux summarizes the profound meaning of magic. The painting shows a spherical woman, reddish in colour, suggesting the cyclical movement of the universal fire, in the middle of whom can be seen some magical characters that signify Venus. In the upper part of the image and with the same characters is written the word Sun, in the lower part, Saturn, on the right, Moon, and on the left, Mercury; in the four corners of the painting are the figures of the four elements, in the top corners water and air, in the bottom corners, earth and fire. It can be deduced that the woman is the Quintessence, called mother of the worlds or celestial Venus, who animates the metamorphosis of the four elements and, with them, all creation. It is a representation of the soul of the world, the cause of the movement of the great fabric of creation; magic consists in establishing communication with it. It may be for this reason that Cattiaux entitles the painting The Force of the Pentacles, as though wishing to express that it is the Quintessence that gives all the force to the pentacles, the magic figure par excellence.
