Flying Buttresses. Hearts of Stone, Sighs…so many titles that lead us towards an architecture of dreams where contradictory relationships take place between setting and shape, full and empty, opaqueness and transparence, between limit and expanding force…silent emotions slipping through our fingers as if by mistake.

One feels that among the soft tones of this intimate theatre-play, with fragments of friezes, pieces of frescos or similar elements, those ochres and their gilts…They seem to be the actors, the tightrope artists, or dancers maybe, caught in the trace of their movement that captures one’s gaze, a look that doesn’t stop, the eye going on and on. Lines, stains, hatchings. We l are looking for the pattern that visually illustrates a shape in vain. Impossible. It moves too much. What we don’t see is there. In the middle in a never stilled memory. Scratched, engraved, drawn, painted, glued, cut out, written, signed pieces of paper. As if they were samples of life. Crumbs of recomposed moments of time. Happenings printed with peculiar intensity: Discrete but dense dramatic art where movement of thought as much as of body reminds us of an irreducible presence by its trail of whatever form. From here the shapes, however precarious they might seem, are none the less positive, glorifying somehow the untouchable secret. The echoes, slipstreams, streaks, have become actual lines, tightrope walkers in our fantasy. They are anonymous, without muscles nor veins nor sex. They whirl, leap, swivel, and throw themselves out of contingencies.

There plays a “mystery” on a decorated background. Thus the shape acts as an empty center, an in-draft of air, a sigh. A journey towards past and future experiences. And it shakes off an interior life amidst writing, codes, and a stream of probably autobiographical signs and conventions. The shape is an archetype that explodes in the middle is the visible form of a story which takes place all around with different episodes, with different intensities, and with aspects of near and far.

The collision of two spaces, one out of time (symbolizing the accomplishment of duration) and the narrative (not localized and unidentifiable) seem to reply to the ambition of the artist like a lightening of conscience.

By Christian Archaud
Translation: Karin Pardenkooper