NATURE MORTE GALLERY, DELHI, 2001
Work made in India during late 2000/2002. Bronzes, mirrors, tuned stone pieces and enamelled panels together with collages.
"La pierre obsidienne est noire, transparente et mate. On en fait des miroirs.
Ils reflètent l'ombre plutôt que l'image des êtres et
des choses"
Pierres - Roger Caillois
"Might I but live to see thee in my touch"
Gloucester, final act of King Lear - Shakespeare
ON EITHER SIDE OF AN OPTICAL PRESENT EXTENDS A SPACE OF MEMORY AND A SPACE OF SPECULATION.
Looking at the convex surface of the carved mirror in this Hoysala sculpture, I am struck by the complexity of the construction of the device. Had the mirror been flat, I would be looking at a woman looking at herself, however the convexity on the reflective surface infers that I, too am included in this optical "menage à trois". The mirror is painstakingly carved in high relief in steatite, its surface is polished, mirror-finished one might say. As a mixed metaphor, it is perfect. The curve of the mirror hides the woman's hand from her gaze, but not from ours, the representation of the optical obscures the instrument of the tactile. The crux, the nexus of this exhibition revolves around this triangular relationship. On the one hand, a series of bronzes cast directly from wax, the latest and probably the last of a series extending back to the mid-1980s. In the declining Dehli October sun a ritual activity: moving the wax from sun to shade, shaping, softening and hardening, Seasonal work. In these pieces the operation of modelling consisted more and more in mapping out in space a projection of the visual memory to be filled with form. Pouring oneself into this insubstantial epiderm till it becomes consubstantial, heavy with its own idea, ready to throw off its skin, moulting, revealing the imago, a freshly cast sculpture, whole in body. Subsequently placing them in a space of their own, offering the eye a piece of frozen past recontextualised in a perpetual present.
The penultimate series of bronzes is more uncertain. Built around an internal logic specific to each piece but shared more generally by the whole series, contructed over a period of months, they are done and undone, constructed around their own corporeal logic and then dismantled (like Rodin's "Balzac") only to be reassembled, "dans le désordre". Deconstruction is taken literally, empathy felt for assembled fragments, these sculptures have a quizzical air, looking at each other as if to question their individuality.
An ultimate set of biomorphic, lobed bells, cast in bronze, ring discordantly and hang in a row mixed in with pygmy lamp bulbs in a dissordered array. Shaped as they sound, they sound as they are shaped, modelling wax to modulate sound.
A
series of collages, peripheral mappings of flattened forms suggest the outline
of the panels, reliefs and mirrors that constitute the second half of the
exhibition, outlines that define the relief they circumscribe, automatic
forms that procede logically from the shapes cut out of space.
In defining their form they offer us a modelled reflection, where the degree
of polish is all important.
The tactile becomes optical, and in so doing the hand is masked by the mirror.
The spectator makes the triangle complete, and in the unique architecture of the Nature Morte Gallery in Dehli, a spherical dome, the context is provided which allowed me to think this series of pieces into an exhibition. The concavity of the space responds perfectly to the convexity of the peripheral works wheras the central axis allows the others to turn upon themselves.
Peter Briggs, Delhi 2001
Texte
pour l'exposition Nexus, Dehli.