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!

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.

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