Chloé CHARMILLOT

Through a selection of large-format works and prints, Galerie de l’ARTsenal in Delémont covers 30 years in the career of the painter and engraver Philippe Grosclaude. From inner wounds to societal realities, the Genevan artist makes human beings the laboratory of his art.

In Delémont, the gallery space is punctuated with large-scale paintings on canvas. At the center of the venue, two imposing, almost totemic works are hanging back to back. The oldest piece of this group dates to 1990. Making their way around the show, visitors immediately pick up on the artist’s concerns. Born in 1947 in Geneva, Philippe Grosclaude draws inspiration from human failing. It is the famous wound, the one that questions existence, torments the mind and pulls it into its meanderings, the one that extends to the mischief and mayhem at work in society.

A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, Grosclaude is a seasoned artist who has exhibited numerous times in Switzerland, notably at the Musée des beaux-arts in Le Locle in 2002, and in galleries throughout both French-speaking and German-speaking Switzerland, including the Galerie Courant d’art in Chevenez, and the Graf & Schelble Galerie. His work has been singled out four times for a Federal Fine Arts Grant and the Boris Oumansky Prize. Last year, the Fondation Atelier Philippe Grosclaude was born. Located in Carouge and devoted to cross-discipline collaborations, the foundation is part of an approach that is committed to fostering diversity in art and culture.

Tag II, 1998

AN ACCEPTED TENSION

By uniting the amplitude of gesture and the ordering of abstract geometrical forms, Grosclaude’s paintings wield a tension that is fully embraced. While the elliptical or egg-shaped drawings lock up tight the interior of the composition, the beams he traces on the surface spill out of the work. He is one of those artists who like to defy the limits of the canvas. With their simultaneous contrast of closed elements and a free unhindered flight beyond the frame, the works give the impression they are radiating.

Sparking emotions, this resistance, this dual inner-outer movement displays his preference for large formats that make sweeping gesture possible. This range is accompanied by a finish that is fully mastered, meticulously carried out. The canvases aren’t the result of a quick and clean execution, a fever born of instinct. Rather they are rooted in a constant and deep inner need. Moreover, the draughtsman focuses on producing one work at a time and proceeds in his artmaking by series of layers. A way of not only entering the fullness of the act but also increasing a certain consistency in the work.

Help, 2009

PASTEL AND VELLUM

Grosclaude is a physiognomist of the emotions. His characters, filled with an enigmatic, statuary presence, are not contorted. They vacillate between the absence of a face and masked portraiture. Stripped of details, the faces, which the artist works to erase, feed into an exaltation of sensations. It is in his prints, monotypes done in a smaller format, that the portraits of Black men assume another more direct importance.

To produce his compositions with their notes of the draughtsman’s art conjuring up graphic novels, charcoal, grease pencil and mostly pastel are used, while the engravings are done on vellum. The use of this paper, with its silky texture, and pastel indicates a penchant for sensitively working the pigment. He whose signature is inscribed in a pyramid wields the paint stick for its greasy quality. Pastel offers a smoother finish, accentuates depth, and fills his works with a soft tactile intensity. In the end, if Philippe Grosclaude brings us face to face with our humanity, in what is most intimate in it and its universality, his art seems to be above all a tool for experimenting in and experiencing his reality.

Sans titre, 2018

Le Quotidien Jurassien, no. 215, 18 September 2021

Philippe MATHONNET

The doubts and force of humans spring from the works of Philippe Grosclaude

BEAUX-ARTS – The Genevan artist hasn’t exhibited in French-speaking Switzerland for eight years. At the Musée des beaux-arts in Le Locle, he shows he has further enriched his talent with a palette of techniques, graphic styles and works that is broader than ever.

The doubts and force of humans spring from the works of Philippe Grosclaude

It has been eight years – since 1994 – that any gallery owner has exhibited Philippe Grosclaude work in French-speaking Switzerland. Now comes a show at the Musée des beaux-arts in Le Locle that trains the spotlight once again on this Genevan artist. With some sixty works that include large-format pastels and monotypes, as haunted as before but also filled with renewal. Where human beings still find they are confronting their own selves and the constraints wearing away at them. Energies and resistances welling up from the depths.

These forces suggest the tensions that are at work in the creation of pictures. For the artist, applying base coats means a long preparation of between twelve and fifteen initial glazes with him sanding the surface after each one. This is how he obtains from his large canvases the responsiveness he would get from a sheet of paper reflecting rather than absorbing the light from the powder of his pastels. It is an effect Grosclaude is particularly fond of, who concedes that “working slowly [he] needs that quick feedback, that technical and visual response that gives the impression the light is coming from behind the picture.” This demand in his work, this discipline “of doing,” as the artist puts it, is important to him.

Grosclaude works tirelessly eight to ten hours per day, sometimes more, including Saturday and Sunday, routinely. It is a matter of rhythm and ritual. And in this case there is something like meditation about it. He indeed sees himself as “a monk who is fulfilling his ministry.” “The continual need to work,” as he writes in an introduction to the booklet published for the show in Le Locle, consists in “establishing throughout your life your own relationship with the world and trying to make sense of the unsettling challenges that any human being faces over the course of his or her existence. Yet over time and with age – he was born in 1942 – a measure of peace accrues. Where earlier in his pictures two contrasting figures would give the impression of facing off while surrounded by sparks, in Transfert (2000), which was chosen for the poster, they now seem to be exchanging good vibes.

Vert-Peru, 1997

Just the same, Grosclaude isn’t about to take a powder to wander around in unreality. Quite the opposite. As Christophe Gallaz writes in the text Le secours that is included in the booklet, “Philippe Grosclaude attests to our difficulty of being in the world. But as he attests to it, he helps you (and himself) as much as he can. Are you lacking in those points of reference that define you as a social being in the heart of the city? There you see them, scattered over the canvas.” And you will find yourself sharing these sentiments. You will be astounded once again before Les Orgues de Manhattan (2001) and the smoking vision of their collapsed remains. Or enchanted by the three superimposed masks of Vert-Perù (1997), which connects you to the most generous of heritages.

Careful though, man is his own enemy. The kinds of architecture the artist introduces into his compositions praise humans’ capacity to build, including their aptitude to construct themselves, but in Ruche (2001), they decry their complacency in getting caught up in their own mazes and pointless rantings and ravings. The solution? Being open to other mindsets. That is the message of the Black faces looming up from Grosclaude’s pastel works. As he sees it, “The African continent is the continent of the future, the one that could effect the greatest renewal, thanks to its spontaneity and potentialities, which ask only to be realized.”

Les orgues de Manhattan, 2001/08

Moreover, the artist demands “the freedom of surprise.” That is one of the functions of his turning to monotypes, those prints that are obtained by inking a glass plate but without the printmaker ever being able to control the resulting image. Similarly the illustrations he reworks on the computer – he has a website, www. philippegrosclaude.com – then prints out as transfers for his canvas paintings allow him to scramble the sensations they cause. Grosclaude displays a mastery of a range and mix of techniques and graphic approaches (paint foams, contrasting and monochrome colorations, an impatient gestuality, precise line, use of the stump to blur and smudge) that breathe new life and force into anyone who lays eyes on his compositions.

Le Temps, 7 mai 2002

Christophe GALLAZ

Help, 2002

You are living now, at the beginning of the 21st century. The world is dominated by noise, speed, adversiting, war, contempt, arrogance and crime, and yet we are secretly governed by our intimate solitude in the midst of the crowd, our instinctiveenergy pushing us headlong into absurd tasks, our lack of education compared to the people around us, our ephemeral pleasures and our endless grief, our fear of getting old and our unfitness for the death: systematic disunity between the old and the new.

All of this makes you wonder: Who am I really? What is my true identity? Where are my home, my town and my country? Then you continue: And what if everything I see were just an illusion? What if it were just a series of echoes, masks and reflections? What if the streets around me, the lines of roofs and the backs of the houses were simply parts of the stage set deceiving me into thinking they are a necessary part of where I live? What if my passage througt human history were no more than a rhread from a huge piece of cloth woven together by chance, and if my fellow human beings were just the toys of something beyond the realms of humanity?

Dessin 1996

If this where you are, just look at the work of Philippe Grosclaude, a series of easily describable images. In one, a row of archways, set in an indefinable architecture. In another, geometric motifs and cubes surrounded by foam, the colour of the primeval sea. Elsewhere, faces that appear to emanate from an archetypal model, with smooth foreheads above aquilin noses. Or simple fluid masses hinting at beings who are absent, dead or were never even born. These are the games of the human presence, constantly appearing and vanishing again, in the midst of its artificial or dreamd-up settings.

Philippe Grosclaude testifies to the difficulty of living in this world. But as he does so, he helps you (and himself) as much as he possibly can. Do you lack those points of reference that define you as a social being in the heart of civilisation? You will find them there, scattered on the canvas. Have you lost some parts of your own slhouette? You will see them nearby. It is to you to survey the peintings and freely to assimilate what you see. Just remember that representations of the past do not faithfully articulate the present, and that the present does not understand itself well enough to point to its own future. This is the game of the present era. Open your eyes exactly as you should, therefore, without expecting too much, but attentively, and you will regain life. This art, like a mirror, will help.

Tri-angles, 1991/14

Christophe Gallaz, Help

In Cat.: Philippe Grosclaude, Musée des beaux-arts de la Ville du Locle, 2002

Laurence CHAUVY

Philippe Grosclaude, pilot for turbulence

Layer by layer, the artist sets down his fears and obsessions, covers them over, freezes and fixes them to the canvas until he obtains a beauty like Baudelaire’s “dream of stone.”

A clash of titans, with shocks and stars; glacial landscape, white and blue, with the earthy hue of tree trunks to warm it; a circular movement made around a central motif, the human figure, where everything comes together. Philippe Grosclaude has concentrated on pastel since 1978 and his works in that medium denote a style and accordingly are immediately recognizable (even independent of their signature, which combines the stamp and the artist’s name). And yet they defy easy description!

L'ange, 1990

THE BALANCE OF TENSIONS

Let’s lay out the terms rather that come to mind when we look at these paintings. Beauty, first of all, clear and unmistakable; melancholy, the melancholy that follows tragedy; the worry of someone who has learned not to cling to his fears; the silence that follows the scream. The patient working of pastel, which is applied in dozens of layers that are set in place each time, surely contributes to this pacified mask, where the various tensions balance one another. Layer after layer, the artist sets down his fears and obsessions, covers them over, fixes them to the canvas until he obtains a beauty like Baudelaire’s “dream of stone.”

Anonymous figures with hooked noses and heavy eyelids haunt these compositions, which are otherwise abstract. There is an everybody and a nobody, Quelqu’un (1993), some Duo (1992), a nameless Portrait (1993); there is the face of Aube (1993), the apparition of L’ange (1990), and especially the Emergence (1993) of something. Indeed, the images express a gush of sudden stars, the beginning that is suggested by the skin of an egg, the pressed-out juice of bunches of protean grapes. Sometimes a juice has been spread over the surface as in drip painting, a mechanism that is used with restraint. The restraint of effects of pigments and colors, of symbols, of the gesture itself – these elements characterize an art that is discreetly generous or generously modest.

Ils sont, 1993/1

PUBLICATION OF A MONOGRAPH

Philippe Grosclaude is exhibiting for the fifth or sixth time at the Anton Meier Gallery; the first time Meier showed his work was twenty years ago in Carouge, where the gallerist had his space, and where the artist can still be found working. Born in 1942, Grosclaude studied fine arts in Geneva and obtained three federal grants before going on to exhibit in both German Eastern and French Western Switzerland. Today Éditions ABC in Zurich is bringing out the first monograph devoted to him, the work of Françoise Jaunin. A mid-career appraisal of a body of work that continues to evolve and still favors forms that are “rounded, elliptical, parabolic, trapezoidal, or tapering at both ends,” according to Fritz Billeter, who wrote the preface. Visitors to the gallery won’t miss the opportunity to venture into an adjoining space to take a look at the large-format works. Elsewhere applied to paper, paper board, or wood, here pastel covers stretched canvases where expanding forms are at liberty to stretch out and spend a potential energy that remains perfectly controlled.

FINE ART Exhibition in Geneva and monograph for Grosclaude
Journal de Genève
, 19 March 1994

Fritz BILLETER

Under The Sign Of The Mask

Since 1978 Philippe Grosclaude has been using pastels, having previously worked in oils and acrylic. The mention of pastels inevitably conjures up flowery hues, the charms of Renoir or the powdery shimmer of the rococo. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was a woman, the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757), who brought the pastel technique out of the relative obscurity of its supporting role. Philippe Grosclaude’s pastel works, by contrast, are neither soft nor airy, but « masculine ». So why take up pastel crayons if you have no intention of exploring their characteristic possibilities? One reason is that Grosclaude’s pictures are created by applying successive layers of colour – sometimes as many as forty. Working in oils, he would have to wait for each layer of colour to dry; with acrylic it would be quicker – but not quick enough for Grosclaude. With pastels, on the other hand, he can apply layer after layer without stopping. (On a technical note, it is interesting that he spreads a layer of grease crayon between each layer of pastel to give the pigment powder a more adhesive substrate.) This continuity in the process of creating the picture is important to Grosclaude. There are artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who spend longer in front of their pictures thinking than actually working on them. There are artists who work on four or five pictures at once, who can switch without difficulty from one to another. Not so Philippe Grosclaude: he can only concentrate on one painting at a time; and that is why, if at all possible, he wants to be able to finish it in one go. The fact that he can only concentrate on one picture at a time means he always has just one thing in mind: his vision. The word seems almost antiquated and pompous in today’s post-post-modern world. On the other hand, I cannot imagine that the dilly-dally approach prevailing today (comme ci comme ça) will last for long. The coming trend could take us where Grosclaude has been from the very start: a tragic position. But how can Grosclaude’s vision be put into words; how can we describe one of his typical pictures.

Sans titre, 1988/22

In Grosclaude’s work, abstract forms are piled, in interlocking structures, layer upon layer, permeating one another in thrust and counterthrust: in rounded, elliptical, parabolic, trapezoid and spindle-shaped forms which are rarely closed and often stretch beyond the edge of the picture. Asserting themselves alongside such expressive geometry are freehand gestures, scratchings, bundled lines – albeit this « tachiste » tendency is tamed, has to hold itself in check. The colour climate is seldom cosmically icy; but a chill wind does blow at you: blue, blue-green, white and black. But this inhospitable quality is countered by warm earth colours which can reach an intensive orange. There are two outstanding motifs in what I have described as Grosclaude’s highly expressive geometry: the mask and the star. It is not that the faces Grosclaude often shows in half profile are wearing masks, but that the faces themselves are frozen into masks. They are petrified in heroic forebearance, in sorrow and pain, perhaps in composure. Grosclaude has fashioned his own set of conventions out of the features of these faces: full, heavy mouths; large, slightly crooked noses, with the bridges somewhat overemphasized so that they catch the light, while the eyes are shrouded in darkness. The head is covered by a cowl or hood, or heavily flowing hair. To the extent that Grosclaude’s faces are always based on the same Mediterranean-male archetype, they can be described as iconic. They can appear to radiate an inner light, have the pallor of a plaster death mask, appear empty, as though extinguished, or almost swallowed by a surge of ambient colour. Grosclaude’s star, a figure with four to seven points, is sometimes set on the mask-like face. More often, it is nearby; and at times appears separately in its own right. Like the face, this symbol is a variation on an archetype. One is reminded a little of the conventions of the comic strip; which would mean a touch of humour could be detected in Grosclaude’s work. May we describe this star as a symbol? And if so, what does it represent? The artist himself says that, on the whole, his paintings always express something akin to an explosion or implosion. His star represents the forces bursting forth as well as those compacted in the inward collapse. In my view, Grosclaude’s star is not there to guide the errant on their path through life, but rather to remind us that our lives are governed by blind fate.

Fritz Billeter, Under The Sign Of The Mask, 1994

In monograph : « Pour un autre regard », Françoise Jaunin, ABC-Verlag, Zurich 1994