Maurice Blaussyld

ENGLISH:

“Shut your eyes and see.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922



In the works of Maurice Blaussyld, there is no repetition but rather reiterations and returns. For his second solo exhibition at Galerie Allen, previous works rematerialise as wholly distinct from their former iterations. Each has its own autonomous presence while belonging to one and the same ensemble. Their doubling and redoubling only accentuate an endless search for perfection; itself manifesting the  indefinable, the unknowable, and the boundlessness of infinity.

From 1987, the artist began making large wooden sound speakers, their exteriors covered in black paint. For the artist, this represents an ‘archetypal material’, the audio amplification and silence being replaced with several chaos[1] or chasms of geometric appearance: a circle, horizontal rectangle, and a superimposed circle on square. These open forms reveal a polarity, a meeting of binaries, such as those of painting and sculpture but also of voice and silence or the visible and invisible. A different work, often compared to the former, includes a large oak panel stained with ammonia, the first version of which dates back to 1998. Positioned against a wall it shows only one of its sides allowing a dodeca-partite grid to emerge, a structure which references the cyclical nature of time. Following the works of Anton Webern, John Cage or Joseph Beuys, the symbolism of numbers, words, and materials is essential for Maurice Blaussyld and is produced by the artist’s internal intuition for an ‘eternal force of the pre-world’.[2] The philosophical, mystical, and at times teleological dimension of the work is beyond decryption as it transcribes a set of poetics which do “Not say nor hide”.[3] Out of the existential analyses come both the forms and formulae that seem to pre-exist everything, just as in the artist’s unpunctuated texts which reveal an interior monologue and the mysterious echo of a Joycean character’s labyrinthine meanderings through a flux of consciousness blending research, incantation and poetry.

In the works of Maurice Blaussyld, an archetype vanitas emerges. This presence of a momento mori is confirmed in the artist’s reproduction of autopsie images. ‘Here the gaze confronts being. Death is the raw image of existence in all its reality, in its full duration; it is how life manifests itself as one, terrible appearance’.[4] The gaze confronts the sublime, deaf cry, the same one at work in Goya’s Black Paintings, as representative of the crisis of their author, in the sense of a subjective shift, in rupture with both fiction and language. If the gesture of painting is at its outset that which covers a surface with a material, in the work of Maurice Blaussyld everything is painting including his texts, a suite of phrases typed in black on white paper. In light of the illusion of our world, the artist opposes a radical pictorial realism which magnifies interstices as intervals and deconstructs the image and its origins so that, ‘Here, a confused celestial body, indeterminable, manifests itself in the process of its own emergence’.[5] Therefore, as Georges Didi-Hubermann writes, ‘we need to close our eyes in order to see, the act of seeing is opening an abyss that constitutes us, watching inside of this abyss is watching in us’.[6]

– Marie Bechetoille
– translated from the French by Alexandra Pedley
 

1 Translation from the Greek Chaos, meaning chasm or void from which the world was created.
2 Maurice Blaussyld, artist statement, 1 June 2016
3 Title of Maurice Blaussyld’s solo exhibition, Galerie Allen, 2013
4 Maurice Blaussyld, artist statement, 10 Octobre 2016
5 Artist statement, 1 June, 2016
6 Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, coll. Critique, 1992, p.11.

Made possible with the support of CNAP (avance remboursable)