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From the brisk waters of the brook to the river's salck ones,
the Northwest passage : in the midstream of life, and aging already, yet the long flow of his life keeps running from its brook-like stage to its slow-moving stage.
Days of grace, quick-running waters, cool source : he indulges in sculpture free-handedly, even more free-handedly than yesterday –how else could his hand grant his works truth and humanity, and tenderly deal with bodies. “Nothing short of a bare word can be believed, and it alone can be creative”. Yet, as must be said, in the twilight of life, he might have been, under the pressure of good and testing circumstances, simplified, divested of the non-essentials, compelled to curb his projects, put in a disposition for genuineness rather than expansion, for discretion and restraint rather than public recognition. And to him, so he hopes, the lesser might mean improved relevance of his hand.
For all that, the river feels heavy with drift-alluvia : he must as best as he can come to terms with his accumulated works –a glut of heavy and bulky earthenware, stone, marble, bronze, crystal sculptures … to say nothing of photos, digital images, writings… Bygones all of them, nearly ghosts, with so little bearing on the act of sculpting. He must nevertheless manage them wisely, since their creation and presence was meant for others than him. And that must be reaching far into the future, as it seems, far after him, thanks to him, in spite of him.
“One has to accept one’s finitude, one’s being in a place and not another, one’s doing this and not that, one’s having this life only. As Socrates in Valery’s work very aptly put it : “I was born several, and I died one. The oncoming child is a crowd without number that life soon reduces to a single person, that which manifests himself and dies”. (André Gorz in Le Monde dated 27 October 2006).
(Translated by Michèle Bustros)
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