“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void …”. Genesis, in the Bible, narrates a creation of the world –heaven and earth- that would be an absolute beginning. John’s Gospel in its turn hits straight inwards, where our most private individual truth lies : “In the beginning was the Word (in other word, Language) … and the Word was God”. In our efficiency-minded civilisation, those who live in action and undertaking had rather identify with God as the creator of earth and world; so had artists as they create. “What they forget” Jean Grosjean stressed, is that it is not his creating the world that turned God into God, nor his inventing a thing of some kind. No, God is God because he is an ongoing conversation, because language dwells in him”. As a matter of fact where else could we all come to life but at the heart of a language hub ? The evangelist is more specific : “Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word, nothing came into being. What came into being through the Word was life”. The word is dialogue, it is an exchange between one who speaks and another who listens and answers. Respon-ding is becoming aware of one’s respon-sibilities through language. Through language, each one is person –alised. Words state one’s difference, one’s inner life, one’s loneliness, and, simultaneously bridge that gap in so far as they make near, and allow individuals to be cor-responding. What is more, when words become discreet –sometimes to the point of being hushed- they still express the quest of a response from someone else, thus leading him towards himself. That, typically, is how words create. They create the strains and common chords between people –their harmonies.

How could I have not associated sculpture with the creation of a language, in my dreams, indulging in the thought of a sculpted language that would be coming to the rescue of a language of utterances and writing, and would thus make up for its limitations ? How could I have not dreamt of seizing any opportunity of a language able to set a different relationship than that of a spoken exchange ?  How could I have resisted the thrill of the adventure within expressing myself by both deepening the gap between the other person and me … and striving to get to her; how else than through that very relationship, that very sculpture, could I have been dwelling in an inwardness … which I would otherwise never have known on my own.

Gen-esis, gen-ius, creative gesture … what is at stake is to work at eng-ineering such marble or earthenware or bronze into a new breed of potent, eloquent, relevant language. The result is a tacit language indeed, a sounding silence, yet a word if account be taken of its sharpness, its concision, its fire, its solemnity, its elegance, its allusiveness, its way of saying-and –leaving-it-unsaid, its discretion … All such things as were acknowledged in Jean Grosjean’s assertion : “Your sculpture is no representation, it is as much of a signifier as written signs”.

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)