Two galleries told me my work was "too finished"
A small gallery in the 6th asked to see my recent work in November. She came to the studio, spent an hour, was polite. Then she told me the paintings were "trop léchées", too finished. As if the finish were a failure of nerve. She said her clients like to feel the struggle, the doubt. I sat with that for the train home and I'm still not sure if it's an insult or a market fact.
Because here's what I keep turning over. I spent four years learning to bring an edge into focus without it looking like I tried. Now the advice is to unlearn it, to leave the hand visible. And maybe she's right about the buyers, maybe the collector wants to see the artist thinking. But I painted a hand last month and I want it to look like a hand. The thinking is there, it's just not performing.
I don't have a resolution to this. I have a stack of finished canvases and a nagging feeling that "finished" became a dirty word while I was teaching in my thirties and not paying attention. Voilà.
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"Trop léché" is one of those phrases that means something real and is also doing commercial work at the same time, and I don't think you have to separate them. She's telling you her clients want to feel the doubt, which is another way of saying they want to feel they're buying a process and not a product. That's a taste, and it's a real one, but it's also a taste that happens to be very cheap to satisfy.
What I'd push back on is the idea that finish and nerve are opposites. Anyone who has scraped a surface back to the canvas knows the two hardest things are knowing when to stop and knowing when the thing is actually done. Four years spent learning to make an edge hold without it looking laboured isn't a failure of nerve. It's the nerve. The hand is visible in a lot of your work I'd guess, just not in the place she was looking for it.
The one thing worth taking from the visit: if two galleries have said it, there's a market somewhere that reads a clean surface as cold, and that's information. Whether it's information you want to act on is a different question, and honestly the answer for most people who work the way you're describing is no.
"cheap to satisfy" is the honest part of this whole thread. a wobble costs nothing. an edge costs four years. and the market can tell the difference in a jpeg, that's the thing, the struggle reads as a jpeg.
i'd add one wrinkle though: it's not purely cynical. the gallery isn't faking a taste, she's got clients who genuinely want the wrist. but "genuine taste" and "convenient taste" aren't opposites either. plenty of things people truly love are just also cheap, and nobody audits that.
tldr the phrase is real and it's also a discount and both are true at once, which is very french of it lol
"nobody audits that" is the part I'll be thinking about on the next train. You're right that it's not either/or. The thing that bothers me is not that she likes the wrist, it's that the wrist has become the safe position. Leaving the hand visible is now the conservative move and it's sold to us as courage. That inversion is the whole problem.
The jpeg line stings because it's true. A smear photographs as energy, a turned edge photographs as nothing. So the market doesn't just reward the wobble, it can't even see the thing I spent the years on. Which is a fine reason to keep doing it and a bad reason to feel good about it.
And yes, very French. We invented the phrase and then charged you for it.
"Cheap to satisfy" is the part I keep circling back to. Because she wasn't wrong, exactly, and that's what makes it stick. A loose passage that reads as doubt costs the painter very little and sells as sincerity. A passage that reads as certainty costs years, and then the client wonders where the feeling went.
But I think you're onto something with the scrape. Knowing when to stop is the whole game, and it's not the same skill as knowing what to leave. I've had paintings where I took the edge too far and killed the thing, and I've had ones where I stopped too early and you can see me flinching. Neither is braver than the other. One is just louder about it.
So maybe the honest version is that she's describing her wall, not my canvas. Which is fine. It's her wall. I just don't want to repaint for it and call it nerve.