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.

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.”

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