13

By dint of seeing so many bodies sculpted in stone and bronze, one might ideally expect them to be loving, hence admirable. Instead, statuary is almost systematically besotted with good, honourable, edifying or martial poses. You can find statues complying with academic conservative rules and thus worshiped as a tribute paid to life, a display of individual or collective statuary, but you will scarcely find any couple statuary.

The reason for that is probably a repulsion to be found in the public, in other words in the order initiative. That repulsion is probably to be found in the artist himself too, in his relying exclusively on models, successive models, on account of his difficulty working from imagination and replacing the model sitting for him by his own assumed mental posture.

Yet isn’t sculpture, after dancing, the most corporal among body-focussing arts ? Therefore, isn’t sculpture an art each person would be rejoicing at finding his/her own love reflected in ? Besides, in so far as the Creator’s hand might be recognised in the happiness of their relationship, then, the moulding of this love in clay amounts to the moulding of one of our basic and most familiar embodied feelings. Isn’t the moulding of it, then, the expression of a double astonishment ?

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)


the waltz 1991
fonderie ANPIRE n°1/8 - 25 cm