Page 56 - Studio International - May 1965

or Stahly have perhaps preceded these new pioneers.
But one will note that the majority of them come from
the field of painting, and that what brought them to
three dimensions. and to its plastic propositions often
unclassifiable (because strictly speaking they are
neither paintings nor sculptures) is a kind of out­
stripping of the easel painting. They remain actually
often painters by spirit or by title: the great piece of
Gerard Singer (painter whom I introduced last year to
the readers of Studio International) is called Wall for
another garden. Some years ago, he had collaborated
with two architects and with the sculptor Cardenas
on 'Space for Something else' for the first Biennale of
Paris. In its turn, there is, in the great torn volumes of
Chavignier, all sorts of echoes of vegetation and myths
of his native Auvergne.
They are all in pursuit of that 'other thing' and what is
remarkable is that they are looking for it amongst the
old disciplines, now a little saturated, of the plastic
arts. as if the most stimulating penetrations of avant­
garde could only happen between painting and
sculpture, or sculpture and architecture and, for the
aesthetic climate, as far from a summary constructivism
as from a masochism of destruction and of humiliated
form. In the field of traditional painting, the new and
original are becoming rare. One can, however, credit
Bernard Saby with these. One of the rare artists
actually at work, practically impossible to attach to a
school or to another artist: Galerie 'L'Oeil'.
If one had to find a competitor. the only one that could
be invoked would be nature itself-the geological and
mineral nature: the painter himself calls his last
paintings 'opalescences· and from this description they
make one think of the changing reflections one sees
in the mass of the opal. But there is also something
fluid and nearly liquid in his vision which develops in
all the space of the painting its intricacies. its meander­
ings and its rainbow-coloured swirls.
These comparisons, a little simple, do not describe
the essential aspect of the works of Saby: the drawing.
Maybe too, it suits the most recent works better than
those, more articulated and of a strangeness more
impressed, that the same gallery was presenting a year
ago. But, in any case, the primary principle of forms
stays the same-the principle of reiteration, of repetition
of the line. One soon discovers, in those mazes in oil
or paste, that the drawing always stems from an initial
theme-line 'unhooked', undulated, hollowed, that the
artist hatches with fine parallels which follow it in all
its capricious detours to reverberate the echo right
throughout the 'format'. like a river with a thousand
banks. We are already far from the more rigorous and
dryer exercises that the painter was practising some
years ago comparable to the spirit of Magnelli, after
having worked in a surrealist climate of which he has
not yet totally freed himself. One is not surprised to
learn, in front of the works of Saby, that he also tried
Wols 1913-1951 musical composition in the past. 'Starting from a
Painting 1949 colourful concordance·, he was telling us one day,
36-.\: X 28¾ in.
Galene Alexandre lolas ·1 must find similarities which help one to organise
the painting·.
These accents are today even more subtle and the
hierarchy has been relaxed. The drawing is less dizzy,
more insidious. Some of the paintings actually shown
at rue Seguier are of an exceptional refinement as if
draped in a mist, silvery, blue or milky which softens
what was a little brutal before in the decrochements,
and the curves of the drawing, in the colours of the
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