(Excerpt from an interview with the art critic Ener Erffoled)

Ener Erffoled: Tell me Rene– you don’t mind if I call you by your first name do you?

Rene de Loffre: No, not at all, please do.

EE: Well, in a way your art looks a bit crudely executed and yet in a way it doesn’t. There’s obviously technical expertise and sophistication there, so why do you choose to leave it at the level that you do?

RdL: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Some artists– joking of course– see me as the founder of a new school of art and have even given this school a name “Funkadelic.” I think that’s a nice thought really, and I only wish it were true. But I leave it a bit crude on purpose. I want to define things, but only to a point that will still allow ambiguity to exist. Do you see what I’m getting at here?

EE: Completely.

RdL: Good, because that’s a really important component of what I do. Another big thing for me is strategically arranging the multitude of elements into any given work so that the eye perceives it as a unified entity and not just space junk floating aimlessly around. Simplifying has not been easy for me.

EE: Good points!:

RdL: Anyhow, it’s been a real struggle putting everything that pops up in my mind into some sort of non-ADD looking result “hey look, There goes a rabbit!” See what I mean?

EE: (laughing) You’re funny. So do you think that your ADD tendency accounts for the rather irrational quality in your works?

RdL: No, I don’t really have ADD. I was curious as a child and have kept this trait so I’m always into this or that. It’s part of my nature and that’s bound to show up in my artwork.

EE : I know, I’m a pretty curious guy myself.

RdL: If you look at my art, you’ll see that there’s actually logic there, but it’s a snapshot of my logic which the viewer either sees or doesn’t see, appreciates or doesn’t appreciate: After all, I don’t say to myself before I start painting, “now what can I put down that others will understand?” I’ve done enough of that in the past.

EE: I want to talk about the figure now. Most of your earlier work was all about the human form, which you sometimes did in an academically rendered fashion. In fact you used to consider yourself a figurative artist, didn’t you?

RdL: Very much so.

EE: But now much of your art is no longer about the figure, and what figures you do put in are quite abstracted. Why is that?

RdL: You know, it’s a funny thing, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to reconcile my figures with their surroundings, at least in a creative way. I had to start every painting with a figure or two, it was my reference point and this need of mine, call it a crutch, really prevented me from exploring things in a meaningful and personal way.

EE: So what made you change things around?

RdL: Simple really. One day the artist Tom Wudl said to me, “Hey, try dumping the figures, they don’t work.” So when I tried it out, voila, a new visual world opened up with tremendous options just for the picking; go figure!

EE: So that was good advice for you, eh?

RdL: Hell, yes!

EE: But you haven’t totally abandoned the figure, have you?

RdL: Absolutely not, but I no longer use it as a focal point. I want it as just another component of what I’m putting down. Right now my figures look more along the line of say a Joan Brown or a Nathan Olivera figure than an academic one. Now don’t get me wrong, my saying that to you doesn’t mean that I won’t someday stick well-rendered and articulated figures in my paintings, but if I do they’ll have to work within the rest of the painting.

EE: I notice that sometimes you do a series on a particular subject or theme, but often you don’t. Is this planned on your part?

RdL: If you look at all of my past work, there are certain objects or subjects that keep popping up all the time, and I sometimes stretch one of these into ten or twenty paintings. But I like to keep open to visuals or events that grab my attention at any given time. I have nothing against concentrating for a length of time on one theme, but that has to happen naturally; often I need to do only one painting to say all I want to say.

EE: Could you give me some examples of things you like to paint?

RdL: That’s some question for me; wow, let me see. Things that have some sort of structural or architectural basis often find their way into my art, like buildings, streets, and other such objects. But I also like to toss in a lot of fauna and flora as well; in fact, some of my paintings include quite a menagerie of animals and insects.

EE: Our time is almost up, so before we conclude I’d like to touch on how you put your paintings together. Do you mind going into this for me?

RdL: Not in the least.

EE: The first thing one notices is the variety of shapes your works take on, they’re really more a cross between a painting and a sculpture. How did this come about?

RdL: It’s really my solving the same sort of problem that I had with the figure. I was always constrained by a square or rectangular-shaped canvas: four sides, no more and no less, always. Like the figure, it restricted me from the start and prevented me getting creative.

EE : So what did you do?

RdL: It occurred to me that I could staple canvases of all sizes together, even leaving empty areas between them to create entirely new shapes. It also occurred to me that I could reverse all or some of the canvases and use the wood frames as part of the composition.

EE: Did you find that doing this helped your creativity?

RdL: And how! Dumping the regular canvas format released me. In fact, I spend so much time constructing these paintings that, by the time I put a brush stroke on them, I’m already embedded into the creative process and have a good idea about what I might want to do with the painting: I hate being faced with a tabula rasa and this canvas sculpting removes this problem for me.

EE: So when you have your novel, one-of-a-kind canvas shape, what do you do with it?

RdL: Then I use just about any materials that occur to me, like collages, stamp impressions that I personally create, plaster of Paris, fabric, hardware, anything that works but– and that’s a big “but”– I try not to overdo it with the multimedia stuff. When all is said and done, I still want it to be first and foremost an oil painting; heavily modified, yes, but still tied together by oil paints.

EE: Have you ever thought of using surfaces other than canvas?

RdL: I’ve not only thought of it, I’m actually doing it. I take a single large :

piece of wood and using a jigsaw, I cut out the shape that the canvases would have taken. Once that’s done, I do my usual things on them.

EE: Wow, that sounds exciting.

Rd: Absolutely!