The staircase keeps its address

A staircase ordinarily serves to leave one level and reach another. We can travel along it without paying much attention, because what interests us lies before or after. In a painting of 1965, Émile Chambon chooses precisely this transitional space. The catalogue title is The Winding Staircase, 23 Boulevard de la Cluse. It associates a form and an address. The painting thus gives what allows us to circulate the possibility of being looked at for itself rather than simply used.

The word winding already introduces movement into our imagination. An ascent that changes direction cannot be understood as a straight line. The body gradually turns, and the eye discovers parts that are not all visible at the same instant. The painting does not let us actually climb the steps. It retains a view on a fixed surface, drawn from a space whose use implies a succession. This difference between possible movement and the motionless image provides a concrete way into the encounter with the subject.

The address makes this encounter more precise. It prevents us from considering the staircase as entirely anonymous architecture. We do not know all the inhabitants, the building’s transformations or the exact circumstances of execution here. These absences must not be filled with an invented neighbourhood story. The title retains enough particularity to attach the work to a named place. It offers a reference point without claiming to deliver every experience that occurred at this address. The painting keeps its object, while the building’s history remains to be documented.

The precise number can produce another effect: what we believed was a general motif becomes a located presence. It is no longer any imaginable staircase. The artist selected the one to which his title gives an address. We can recognise this decision without assuming the place necessarily has an intimate meaning whose key we possess. A space’s familiarity and its biographical value are two different questions. A painting can preserve a precise place even when its personal reasons are not entirely accessible to the visitor.

A staircase also belongs to the spaces several people share in succession. It is not reduced to one occupant’s private room. The consulted source does not describe every use of the place painted; we can nevertheless reflect on this general function of the motif. A shared passage makes encounters possible but often remains in the background of their telling. The painting reverses this hierarchy of attention. It invites us to consider the structure accompanying movement, with the possibility of noticing what habit made less visible.

To look at such a work, visitors can keep two simple questions. What conveys an orientation or a turn? What transforms an architectural element into an independent pictorial presence? These questions do not require an absent character to be recounted. They return attention to the work of representation. The title has given us an object and an address; the painting must now be examined in what it proposes. A documentary description helps us begin but does not replace the time given to the painted surface.

The year 1965 likewise does not fix every possible use of the image. Painting retains a historical reference, while our experience of staircases may come from other places and moments. This distance allows an encounter without complete identity. We recognise the motif’s function, then discover a particular execution by Chambon. The subject need not be spectacular to hold attention. Sometimes an artist need only shift our priority: stop seeking where a passage leads for a moment and begin considering how it exists.

The address finally remains attached to the staircase, while the work opens a wider space for looking. We do not visit the entire building through the painting. We encounter a choice, that of giving a surface and a title to a place ordinarily passed through. The account can stop at this precise transformation. At 23 Boulevard de la Cluse, a passage supplied Chambon with a subject; in the painting, that passage no longer leads only elsewhere. It becomes itself a place where our attention can remain.