Page 57 - Studio International - December 1967

Facing page, top Seurat not. Then there was the element of present im- Warhol's are essentially Dada and primarily
Les Clochetons 1881/83 perfect, Stendahl as opposed to Raphael, the literary. These are poetic variations on a theme, or
x 13 in.
structural presence and the intimate revelation. rather themes constructed on a body of skilled
Galerie Claude Bernard
And it was the second set of impulses that earned variations. A volcano in eruption erupts not once
Facing page, bottom Antonie Tapies Ingres his place beyond fashion. Like Manet and but successive times, and yet, by dint of repetition,
Nu 1966, painting Flaubert, he was a great delineator and a réaliste not at all; the lava spout becomes a rhythmic
51 x 56 in. malgré tout. delineation. A city facade is squared, cubed,
Galerie Maeght The moral, pointing to the hazards of virtue and disintegrated and reformulated to evoke its formal,
the pitfalls of concensus, might well produce a stark, byzantine interior. The image is jarred out
Below Ingres
healthy insecurity in contemporary circles, but of one focus into another. In a less typical per-
Study for the Oath of Louis XIII
probably will not. The FIFTH PARIS BIENNALE formance Sarkis holds the refractions to a minimum
Bottom Sarkis proved, again, the seductive power of whatever and puns a fugue of marching men with facades of
Exposition No. 10 1967 Salon happens to reign at any given time. The vic- marble, and then the tide of marble with a back-
Photos and plastic adhesives on canvas tims —and precious few were not — were all of ages drop of roses redundant, a la Gertrude Stein.
77 x 77 in.
20 to 35. Ideas and invention were presumed to be The photography, which was a refined product
the looked-for criteria, with no prejudice against in its previous, Paris-Match incarnation, now
hysterical pregnancies as opposed to the other kind. becomes raw material. Nor is the raw material
In fact, Romanticism always harbours the idea that imposed upon coyly or fashionably. It is simply
a hysterical pregnancy is potentially infinite in its anatomized, but skilfully so, and it becomes a
possibilities, whereas the other kind is hackneyed. valid medium of perception and definition.
And when it come to Romanticism, the Salons of Can one ask for more? You can refine a shape
1967 and 1867 may be in closer proximity than drastically and produce perceptual confusion, and
anyone likes to think. you can also diffuse a shape and produce the longed-
Whereas the beauty of the Antonie Tapies show for clarity. As in the Seurat drawings of GALERIE
at GALERIE MAEGHT is the sublimation of the CLAUDE BERNARD'S Seurat to César anthology
idea in a tangible and hermetic bloom that defies of drawing and sculpture. This is an informal show,
justification and explications. These are works of but a major little show, in the sense that it can well
the past two years, out of Spain and hence out of a be used as a point of reference. Sensibility is its
kind of voluntary exile. Whereas a century ago, uncommon denominator, and a crystal clear focus
anything that happened in art tended to happen at is its result. As for the Seurats, the misted archi-
nerve centres of intense communication, the tecture is so internally complete and so advanced
pressure of mass media may now have set the that it discounts the inherent value of any one
reverse law into effect. Cunning is no problem but stylistic breakthrough, then or now. The cogency
silence and exile are at a premium. is there in the flesh or nowhere at all.
In Tapies' work, silence abounds. One thinks of And so to John Wragg's sculpture at GALERIE
the silence behind the wail of the flamenco cantor in ALEXANDRE IOLAS. Wragg began with the
which the endless flexibility of the human voice finely sheared form and it is logical rather than
is tethered to the rigorous uses of incantation. To coincidental that the vocabulary of Cool Art
evoke the inexpressible is the purpose of ritual and sculpture became meaningful to him. The earlier
the repetition of ritual. In Tapies, the surface totems seem to have come frankly and cogently out
increments and expatiates and, like the inflections of Brancusi, and then the cool forms depart from
of the cantor, seems simply to abide. the totemic presence, grow denser and terser and
Of late, Tapies has also tried moving into a muter. Given present enthusiasms, he might have
higher key, off on more febrile tangents in which been led to stop there, but did not. The latest works
the surface thins and the incidental symbol revert instead to shapes that are more metaphorical
suddenly flings itself into one corner, grinning and again more totemic. So that Wragg's progress
impudently as the Cheshire Cat, and fading just as is motivated by internal necessity rather than
surely. These may be liberties taken but they are attuned to stylistic conclusions. The seed lives and
also confirmations sought after. The language the life force stirs. This time it's real.
remains strict and the more extreme variations are
actually attempts at defining out limits rather than
at pretending that outer limits do not exist.
At GALERIE BLUMENTHAL-MOMMATON, Sar-
kis (who is Turkish and works in Paris) looks for
contours in the diametrically opposite fashion. You
can hardly call Sarkis a painter because he hardly
paints. The medium is photographic, but Sarkis
did not take the photographs either, Paris-Match
seems to have taken most of them. Still, Sarkis is a
visualist whose materials are international and
mechanically wrought but whose statement is
convincingly eastern.
Bain Turc, which were intended as pragmatic, What he has done is to fragment, retract and
personal notations, ended up closer to Renaissance reconstruct photographic passages into fugues that
architecture than any concoction set to that goal. recall the original message yet disassociate the
In all the paintings, there is the element of original sequence. The procedure is technically
stasis in which Ingres, longing after Raphael, akin to, but effectively far removed from Warhol's
promised to become a French Vermeer, and did multiple repetitions of photographic documents.