AMANTS ST JEAN
LOVERS OF THE ST JOHN NIGHT

bronze h.72cm 1998
fonderie du Gour

4

For 30 000 years, ever since man’s hand has been working at art, it has been in the Greatest Tradition of Sculpture to convey woman, and the beauty of woman. Ever since I started sculpting, as women really mattered in my life, I always knew my hand was both skilled and high-spirited from that long-standing Tradition –a creative faithfulness. Sculpting, as well as loving, means matching what obliges me, carries me away, fills me with endless diversity and prodigality. Whether a real flesh-and-blood woman or a sculpted art piece, it all deals with an adventure for the eyes and the hands : in  either case you have a nudity, a private facing, a hand-to-hand struggle, a balance of strength and gentleness with no escape from surrendering all one’s own. Far away from me, these sculptors of the Renaissance and down to Rodin’s days, struggling in the dualism of their times (that of angel and beast, that of the soul aspiring to God and falling back into matter …); even farther from me, those 20th century sculptors, so harsh to women. I neither feel repulsion nor degradation as I have a sculpture in progress; quite the opposite, a feeling of intense taste and satisfaction pervades me, along with a debate, a demand substantially resonant with the woman met. What I love is my sensing that God is an infinite otherness; and that, although He is infinitely close to me, this otherness is given to me while He remains unreached, effaces Himself and unlimitedly allows Himself to melt away into other faces, first of all that of a woman –most other, most close, hence most desirable. Now, if I take the risk of a sculpted expression of it, the demand not to be misled that I have to face is no lesser than in prayer, but with the extenuating advantage of mildness that goes as far as I can take it to, provides me with a shape and guides my man’s drive; mildness that equally cools the dissatisfaction of incompletion, and soothes the agonising throes of unattainable perfection without quenching the craving for trespassing on her share of mystery, and of most precious privacy. Her seduction.

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)