Paris-Lund, Jacques Adelin Brutaru, 1979
PARIS-LUND
Group Show
Jacqueline Dauriac, Annick Doideau, Roseline Granet, Marina Rodna, Claude de Soria and Janie Varades-Söderberg
August 25th to September 30th 1979
My encounter with cement, my studying cement, have made me meticulously obedient and docile in the face of what the material, which is new to me, has to offer. And in the process I have rediscovered basic principles that have always stimulated my work. Utterly absorbed in the importance of my encounter with this new material, I have somehow become even more aware of my underlying quest.
Claude de Soria
The world of today, contained as it is in an oppressive and stifling envelope of concrete and cement, has come to be seen as dull and grey. Where we live has to be symbolic of our civilization. Artists and architects have tried to make functional materials more human and more aristocratic. They rarely succeed and when they do it is only timidly so.
Claude de Soria’s cement sculptures offer a different response to our contemporary fate, which has seemed so inescapable. She has established a new relationship between creator and material employed, between artistic endeavour and outcome, whence arises a newly human and aesthetically sounder view of this accursed material. Reciprocal conditioning is revealed. The vivifying action of unconscious impulse stirs hidden potential. Physical and chemical phenomena combine harmoniously to make form and message.
Every compartment of our cosmos is founded upon determinism. Innumerable laws remain unknown. They generate inexhaustible mythologies, haunted by esoteric and supernatural conceits. Claude de Soria’s work traverses intangible dimensions to attain palpable, moving realities. The coincidence of virtual energy in a material and an artist’s temperament, leads inexorably to a visual transposition of fundamental laws.
Structure and frank form delivered of ingredient allow the material to express its self. A personal recipe for cement finds expression in a basin turned crucible, wherein it is defined through hardening. Each operation produces a hemisphere. Assembled in twos, they make up a finished sphere. The visible face of the sculpture reflects the form of the vessel. Contrary to expectation, though gesture and technique are invariable, the result is never the same. Every experiment generates something subtly changed. Air bubbles bring form to life, as do the rough edges of the half-spheres, which, assembled, produced a gap that amplifies the play of light. A fertile palette of greys from warm to blue-tinged forms.
By pouring cement onto celluloid, De Soria obtains circular forms, almost perfect circles. The surprising effect is reminiscent of mineral structures. Sculpture finds an echo in marks printed on paper.
The artist’s vision shifts with her stalk-pillars. Vertical reach complements ever-present round shapes. The stalk-pillars seem more freely implanted. They join a non-fixed approach to sculpture, as though animated by an environment which in turn they animate.
Symbolic references arise in complexity contained. Spheres offer an astral vision. Circles, a sense of the integral unity of our universe, which is fundamental. Stalks and pillars suggest the columnar-tree of knowledge, a material contact with the Spirit. Cement itself is a glue that binds maker and material fast, in the interests of unity.
Potential occurs. Poetic emotion too. In what prompts this work, they are joined.
Jacques Adelin Brutaru