Embers under ashes
My writings and sculptures may be regarded as fostering naivety and dream about women and “love”. So it is. But I should probably explain about what level in beings, what virtuality, what teaching method I take into consideration. All around, harsh lives, a world in sufferings and torments, none of which can be stopped, all of them overwhelming when I think of them, obsessing when I read the news or listen to them or watch them; When I get absorbed in a book, I am hit and overtaken. According to the Tao, “Everyman carries darkness upon his back and embraces light”. Quite a difficult balance to keep between awareness of evil and inner equanimity, confidence.
Now what about my art, writings&sculptures ? Art, it has been said, should be the reflection of the harshness of the world and bear testimony for it. In fact, somehow or other, my own balance keeps hunting about for itself, taking chances, which, as I hope will result into an art able to reflect the harshness of the world and bear testimony for it, simply because that way of keeping one’s ears open to roughness is but a way of making eager expectancies of humanity, harmony, happiness and dormant beauty heard. As was psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto’s amazing way of listening.
And what about the sculptor’s on-looking and tactile sensitivities ?
As a sculptor, I grapple with very carnal-related matters; I am deeply attached to corporeality; I therefore pay a particular attention to everything at stake in amorous relationships. I have eye contact a well as hand contact : my whole mental process becomes phenomenological, in an attempt to understand what is experienced or perceived from the body and by the body. When “love” is concerned, a lot, really a lot of steel, of selfishness, of violence, of disappointment, of loneliness, of spite is expected and experienced … But what, through those “loving experiences”, is actually hit in those bodies and hearts ? Each time, it amounts to exposed sensitiveness, flesh bare, raw to the sores of it, and so much so that it yearns for however small a harmonious achievement it may appeal for and find. Each time, what those “love-making” beings implicitly tell each other is engraved in an underlying way or by default; each time it is started again through desiring, lacking or escaping; each time can be grasped what they mean, and guessed what they display : such as they are in flesh made, their corporeality makes the sculptor think, as a true, direct challenge.
Well, I stick to that underlying, deep and dormant eloquence, as did Mozart in his “Magic Flute”. What I above all appreciate is the satisfaction of the people who discover that my feminine and couple figures stand for an expression of their best desires, of all those desires they never dared making real and yet seem all the more true for that reason. My starting point, my point in sculpture is about the humanity experienced originally and ever, for millions of years, the one that initiates us as men and women. My starting point is what a woman’s love moved most deeply in me. Here I am, trying to rekindle the fire, to rekindle the embers under the ashes, totally committed to hoping for what is deeply desired in love relationships. My art ? I, a witness of the toughness of life, somehow keep and revive, like embers under ashes, the naïve share that lies under love’s grey and dull spots –i.e. the frail element of rejuvenation in life which, far from dying out, keeps calling itself to mind. Embers, embrasures, passion braziers.
(Text and quotation translated by Michèle Bustros)
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Maya
bronze 2007 h.80cm
WHEN THE WIND IS RISING
terre 2007 h.100cm
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