Page 57 - Studio International - December 1968
P. 57
facing page above Sugai 5 seconds avant 1968 below left lpousteguy Head
oil on canvas 99 x 79 in. Carrara marble
Mead Corporation Galerie Claude Bernard
facing page below lpousteguy Naissance 1967 below right Damian Throne
plaster maquette for Carrara marble Galerie Stadler
39t X 32 X 36 in.
Galerie Claude Bernard
whatever you like about it,' Ipousteguy insists, 'but
say that I carved it all myself.' The point is signi
ficant. The muscular drive itself, the sharp weight
of chisel upon stone, is central even to the illusory
transposition of marble into lactic tides or, in one
case, of red marble into blood, the relationship of
the physical to the cerebral being as central to
Ipousteguy's art as it would necessarily be to Jove
itself. 'It is the mind, not the body, that desires the
body,' wrote Remy de Gourmont-which is true,
and the basis, in parallel, of much contemporary
art. And yet, Ipousteguy is talking about con
summations. Such is the basis of his return to flesh,
of his choice of marble in the service of metaphor,
of his weighing of permanence and transience
along the seam that divides life and death. There
is nothing approximate about the experience.
At GALERIE STADLER, the Roumanian artist
Damian-not specifically a painter, nor sculptor,
but eminently a magician-concerns himself with
the other side of the coin. This is an art of signs,
but signs redeemed from their function as symbol
to become independent realities. Earlier, Damian's
theme was the pyramid, stepped fetishes that
carried an archaic nostalgia as a scent is carried
and not described. Now, the forms have become
either thrones or massive pediments that contain
reference to unlimited space, fragments of sky such
as the wisps of blue that might filter, escutcheon
like, through a cathedral vault.
The authenticity of the experience lies in the fact
that the sensation is untamed, not refined to a neat
jargon, full of a saving innocence. There is some
thing of the oriental conundrum, something of the
Byzantine facade, and nothing of the decorative in
Damian's objects. If Ipousteguy's vocabulary is
explicit and even verbose at times, these obser
vations are implicit and strictly understated. Their
dimension is that of architecture. If the lpouste
guy's move toward an inner, central point by way
of the first person singular, a keen awareness of the
self, the Damian's take the opposite course, up to
the surface from a source darkly apprehended, per
haps forgotten. Paul Waldo Schwartz
269
