Tag: Sculpteur

Dialogue between the artist and his time

DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND HIS TIME

Jacques Riousse

Lisieux, 1946

The works of modern artists often elicit two opposing reactions from the public: one of interest, the other of incomprehension. On the one hand, there is astonishment and curiosity; on the other, hostility and sometimes even fury.

There seems to be a disconnect between the vision of artists and the average taste of their contemporaries, as if their creations were perceived as unusual objects, foreign to the concerns of the majority.

No art form escapes this confrontation. We need only recall how Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse, Germaine Richier’s sculptures (Christ d’Assy), Olivier Messiaen’s music and Bertolt Brecht’s theatre were received in the recent past.

But it is undoubtedly painting that gives rise to the most heated debate. Standing in front of the canvases of a modern art exhibition, we see very different reactions depending on the age, culture or social status of the visitors.

There are those who ask questions. “What does this mean?

What does it represent? Where should we look? Which way is up? Which way is down?‘ Others snigger in front of an abstract painting. ’You call that painting? My kid could do that! It’s not difficult – just squeeze tubes of paint randomly.‘ – Those who are furious and set themselves up as defenders of eternal values. ’It’s scandalous!‘ they say in front of a Picasso painting. ’It’s a deliberate attempt to disfigure men and women. It’s an attack on good taste and society!”

Those who, faced with new research, see only the material and exclaim, ‘But it’s made with old rags and rubbish!’

Those who take refuge in the past. ‘Ah, the sweetness of Umbrian light in the paintings of the Quattrocento! The beauty of the virgins of Raphael and Rubens!’

Those who are worried because they doubt their judgement and no longer have any reliable criteria.

Those who feel confusedly that this concerns them and challenges their worldview.

How can this situation be explained? Are artists no longer witnesses of their time, reflections of their era, interpreters of their contemporaries? Or is it the public who, unable to keep up with rapid change, find themselves left behind?

In previous centuries, artists were more or less in favour, but there was no fundamental dispute about their art. History shows the parallel evolution of a people’s life and its artistic expression. A style is the mark of a society. It is an identical way of thinking, of looking at the world, of considering the great problems of life, which acts simultaneously in all sacred and profane domains, inspiring all trades and guiding intellectuals and manual workers alike. In our Western world, there has been a continuous movement from one style to another (Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Classical) in line with the evolution of society. But around 1860, we reached a critical point. The artists who would mark their era were rejected and misunderstood. They brought a new vision of the world, but one that seemed incongruous to their contemporaries. This revolution, initiated by Delacroix, continued with the Impressionists and then exploded with the three great painters who were at the origin of all modern art movements: Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Cézanne paved the way for Cubism, Gauguin for Fauvism and Van Gogh for Expressionism.

Since then, things have moved very quickly. There has been a fragmentation in all directions, with abstract, surrealist, gestural and informal painting, among others. So much so that today, in the second half of the 20th century, it is difficult to take stock and see clearly through all these trends. Some people balk at this and, rejecting all contemporary research, look back nostalgically to the past, where they believe they can find safe and comforting values: easily recognisable subjects, expressive beauty, harmony of form, order and composition based on symmetry, finesse and the quality of execution.

Let us see if it is possible to identify some constants in works of art that are valid both yesterday and today. Before confronting them with the 20th century, let us try, without resorting to aesthetic theory, to understand the artist’s approach in his creative act.

Let us start by eliminating two extreme temptations: excessive servility to reality or, on the contrary, the total negation of reality.

A work of art cannot be a slavish reproduction of nature. The sculptor knows this well and does not try to achieve the truth of his model through moulding. A lion in its stuffed remains in the Natural History Museum is less real than in a bronze by Barye.

A musical evocation of the sea is not a simple reproduction of its sounds. You can take a tape recorder and record the breaking of the waves on the rocks at the Pointe du Raz, but you will not obtain anything comparable to Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ – the dramatist does not give the impression of real life by transcribing heard dialogues. And children are not mistaken when, without knowing it, they experience great artistic joy in the midst of their toys, casually allowing and recomposing the elements of a world that surrenders to their fantasies as budding creators. In every child who begins to draw, there is an artist who, unfortunately, will not be able to protect their inner vision for long against all the logical arguments of overly reasonable adults. They do not reproduce what they see according to the laws of perspective, which they do not know, but what they have extracted as most essential from reality, which they reinvent.

Nor can a work of art be an abstract elaboration of thought concentrated on itself without contact with reality. Anyone who deludes themselves into believing that, after cutting off all contact with the outside world and retreating into the cell of their own self, they are capable of drawing the elements of a masterpiece from it would quickly be diverted from this path by the dryness and poverty of the results. Although underlying every work of art is a mathematical structure, a symphony of numbers that is expressed more or less consciously through rhythm in poetry, music or dance, or through a modulation of space in architecture, one should not expect to automatically achieve beauty by applying formulas or a golden ratio if one has previously walked through the world with closed eyes and a hardened heart.

Therefore, neither slavish reproduction of nature nor conception unrelated to reality, the birth of a work of art presupposes questioning, dialogue, a relationship between man and the world. The artist is not separate. He participates in communal life, but he is more sensitive, capturing its imperceptible vibrations with numerous antennae, perceiving the forces, currents and waves that run through it. He listens to people’s calls and anxieties. He intuitively grasps their deepest aspirations and unspoken desires. Then he withdraws a little from the noisy crowd. This is so that he can meditate in solitary retreat on everything he has recorded, to take a step back and thus embrace broader perspectives, to gather together this fleeting multiplicity and link it to the immutable, to fix something of this human becoming. The artist, now in a state of clarity, suddenly grasps, by penetrating to the heart of beings, the secret relationships that he had long suspected but been unable to grasp.

This thought, formed in contemplation of the one and the many, is projected outward into space and time by the artist, who imitates God through a creative effort. He imbues inert matter with it. But matter resists, and difficulties arise. The sufferings of conception are now compounded by those of realisation. By becoming incarnate, thought limits itself, but it must become incarnate in order to repeat itself, pass into others and thus acquire a new life. The two conditions of life and unity require the work to develop according to the laws of harmonic growth.

The melodic theme of a symphony is continually repeated and developed in various perspectives. The ogive of a cathedral provides the basic element that modulates the spatial layout from the arches of the portals to the spires of the towers. In a tree, the same rhythm governs the departure of the main branches and the fine shoots of the terminal branches. From the roots to the superstructures, there is unity despite all the contingent variations.

Through an internal thrust, the journey through the air is not without struggle. Twisted branches seem to have penetrated a hostile environment strewn with hardened air pockets, like roots circumventing the obstacle of underground rocks. These branches are graphics in the sky, the result of multiple influences: gravity pulling on the branches with all the weight of the earth, the force of prevailing winds, expansion, and the attraction of light. The branches caught in these eddies bend, twist, crack, or are sometimes torn away by a storm. But as we see them, these old trees, despite their deformed branches, their healed wounds and all the scars of their history, retain a mark of unity in a rhythm of their own that allows them to be recognised from afar, even in winter when stripped of their leaves and only the geometry of their skeleton remains.

More mysterious than the harmonious growth of the tree is that of man. The proportions of the body change with age (the head is about a quarter of the body at birth, an eighth in an adult), but a mother who sees her child grow up has no doubt that it is still the same being, and if she recognises it, it is because, despite the variations, there is something fundamental that does not change, maintaining the character of unity in continuity.

These examples of harmonious growth in trees and humans can be transposed to any work of art, which must follow the great universal laws in its own way, echoing the currents of life that flow through the cosmos.

Nothing. Birth – Life – Death – Something else – The story of every evolving being, from an acorn that becomes an oak tree, a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly, a human being destined to be resurrected. The plan for a symphony, a cathedral, a poem. From silence springs a song that develops, reaches a moment of maximum intensity, then fades and dies. And when silence returns, this effort is not lost but transposed. A work of art must reproduce this curve of life, taking man into account. For aesthetic consciousness always aims at a certain mode of being, where movement is driven from within, in truth and simplicity. For a thought that is sure of itself is not afraid to assert itself. Make no mistake, this apparent simplicity is not poverty. It can only be achieved after slow work. The precision, clarity, purity and ease of this line, which seems to spring forth on its own, requires many sketches, trial and error, and fruitless attempts.

Hundreds of studies and thousands of tracings precede the development of a prototype. Sleepless nights accumulate before the melody or poem finally emerges, and generations of researchers work obscurely before the one who formulates the discovery.

Every birth in suffering is also a source of joy. For the finished work, despite its limitations, carries within it a reflection of the thought from which it sprang, with the power to be repeated in a multitude of harmonics in the consciousnesses that echo it.

Matter retains an imprint of the thought that informed it. Thus, the hull of an old cargo ship, its sides encrusted with shells and seaweed, evokes for the sailor the southern seas where he has long sailed. Thus, the alluvium, stratifications and faults of a terrain summarise for the geologist the history of ancient folds and movements.

Millions of people who come into contact with a work of art, such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Chartres Cathedral, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or the Pilgrims of Emmaus, will feel a song rise within them that is unique to them, but which nevertheless resonates with the creative thought. This song, which through poor material touches other consciousnesses in their intimacy and depth, must possess the character of interiority from beginning to end. It can only arise in a person who has felt deeply within themselves, to the point of heartbreak, what they express outwardly. This effort to project beyond the usual limits ensures the work’s survival, for its power of influence is all the greater in that it contains a greater concentration of thought, aspirations, impulses and desires. If, beyond the spatial and temporal framework of its emergence, it can touch diverse consciousnesses, it is because it carries a note of universality. It is people who give it its true existence. Whatever the intermediary object, aesthetic communication always requires, at its outset and in its archive, a human consciousness as creator and resonator. It is not the instrument that makes the melody, but our ear. The violin emits sounds. Our ears analyse them, classify them, memorise them in terms of pitch and intervals, and recreate the rhythms and melody. Similarly, the film camera does not create movement. It merely projects a series of discontinuous images onto a screen. It is our eyes that recreate the movement by linking these images together.

This is why, in their role of communication between people of different races and generations, the visual arts have the advantage of imposing themselves without intermediaries.

To understand the profound thoughts of a writer, you have to read their work. This takes time. To participate in a composer’s musical thought, you must necessarily follow the progression of his chords over time. But when faced with a painting, you are struck by an instant, global perception that intuitively allows you to share another person’s vision and immediately enter their inner world. This is a privileged means of communication, direct, without intermediaries, universal.

Let’s compare an Italian Renaissance painting, such as the Mona Lisa, with a Chinese painting from the same period, The Storm. In all classical Western art, man is at the centre of creation. Nature accompanies him as a backdrop, in a blue distance with parks, mountains and forests. The Chinese framing is completely different. It is a vertical rectangle, much taller than it is wide. In the middle is a cloud, from which emerge a section of mountain, a waterfall and a tree. If there is a human figure, it is only incidental, often at the bottom of the painting near a small bridge, where Western painters place their signature. Renaissance man believed that nature was made for him and that he should use it, transform it and treat it as a tool. The Chinese of the Ming dynasty, on the other hand, spontaneously adopted an attitude of humility towards a cosmos of which they believed themselves to be only a tiny and transient part.

There has always been a correspondence between the artistic productions of an era and its underlying motivations. It would be surprising if this were no longer true. For my part, I believe that artists are always witnesses of their time. But much has changed very quickly since the industrial era.

The pictorial revolution that took place in the West a century ago was above all a new way of looking at the world and situating man within it. The goal of research is no longer nature itself, but nature as subject to human questioning.

If painting were merely reproduction, imitation of nature, Pascal would be right in saying: ‘What vanity is there in painting, which attracts attention by the resemblance of things whose originals we do not admire?’

But today, photography has freed painting from a minor role, that of anecdotal reporting. And it still has a privileged role, that of being an ideal means of communication, allowing immediate access to the depths of another’s vision. It is not Newton’s apple that is important, but the way in which he associated it with the law of gravity. What is extraordinary is not Cézanne’s apples, but the new way he looked at them. Seen by anyone other than Manet, the water lilies in his pond would not have attracted attention. But the revelation they bring is a new analysis of light, broken down and then reconstituted into its complementary elements.

Man now seeks to unlock the secrets of nature. He is no longer content with superficial observation and seeks to penetrate to the very heart of things. His field of vision is expanding and, with the aid of sophisticated tools, is surpassing the capabilities of the naked eye. With the electron microscope, we can see beyond molecules, to atoms and their constituents. With radio telescopes, we can detect the presence of objects more than a billion light years from Earth. Reality is no longer made up solely of what we can touch with our hands, see with our eyes or hear with our ears. Our senses give us a true representation of the world on our scale, but it is approximate, incomplete and limited to a narrow range. Colours exist beyond the visible spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet. The silence of the sea is only apparent, and is due to our deafness to the frequencies emitted by fish.

Thanks to technology, we can now hear them. The keyboard of sensations has become much broader than we thought.

If you hold a steel ball bearing in your hand, you have a direct tactile and visual impression of something shiny, cold, rigid and metallic. But the impression of compact density is only an illusion. Beneath the surface, there is a molecular architecture, itself made up of atoms with much more empty space than solid space. And the atoms themselves are miniature star systems, with electrons orbiting the nucleus at speeds of around 300,000 kilometres per second. This swirling vision of a population of energy particles is truer than the approximation of the rigid metal sphere.

We accept this diagram on a blackboard in an electronics class, but for many, this intellectual concept has not changed their everyday understanding of the world. For most people, facts move faster than ideas. Language struggles to keep up with the evolution of knowledge.

We know that the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun. But let’s admit that we usually live our daily lives in Ptolemy’s system. Our language is still geocentric. Instead of saying sunrise or sunset, we should feel the side of the Earth that carries us, with the sea, the mountains and the city, tilting in space towards the zone of light or darkness.

Through their work, sailors, pilots and now astronauts have a sense of the relativity of movement. New images come to mind when they hear a name. For most tourists, Nice evokes a colourful postcard view: the Promenade des Anglais, the blue sea, the green palm trees, the pink houses.

But for a Boeing pilot stopping there overnight, Nice is an abstract painting, the blue dots of the runways framed by red dots, not far from a large constellation of lights curved around the black disc of the sea. If the pilot is a painter, why couldn’t he project onto a canvas what is for him the familiar view of Nice?

The sea does not have the same reality for the painter with his parasol setting up his easel at the end of the jetty in the small port as it does for the scuba diver plunging into the depths ‘like a bunch of grapes’. Speed has changed our relationship with the earth. The landscape is no longer just a window open before our eyes. You can physically penetrate it in all its parts and gain a comprehensive understanding of it.

Crossing the Alps on a motorbike in a day will give you a different perspective from that of de Saussure. You will have had to use your muscles to balance the force of the bends, feel the pressure of the slopes and the plunges on the winding descents. This does not replace walking and contemplative viewing, but it is a way of knowing that is worth experiencing.

The amount of information we receive in a very short time,

about our immediate environment and what is happening all over the world, even on the other side of the globe, gives us a kind of instant ubiquity and expanded awareness. The danger would be to be overwhelmed by all these stimuli to the point of being submerged and acted upon by them without any rational classification, without any real choice or control on our part.

We have known since the discoveries of depth psychology that there are underground layers within us that rarely emerge to the surface and that our motivations are not always conscious. After Hieronymus Bosch and Goya, surrealism deliberately exploited these regions of the subconscious. What is painted is no longer the subject itself, analysed with a critical eye, but the image it has conjured up, triggering strange associations as in a dream. Man is bound to the determinisms of origin and environment that precede and accompany his life. Freedom does not lie in their negation but in their revelation and questioning. Through aesthetic expression, at the same time as man reveals himself to himself, he gives the senses a new being, with a power of symbolisation that takes on its maximum meaning at the moment when the experience is lived by its creator, or relived through the work, by a multitude of listeners or spectators.

In one of Claudel’s poems, there is this comparison: ‘The sea was so blue that only red was redder.’ In terms of grammatical logic, this makes no sense. But Claudel is right in communicating to us, at the limits of words, the intensity of the sensation. For humans, red carries a much more violent potential for sensory excitement than blue. It is no coincidence that red is the colour of danger, fire, prohibition, poison, blood, anger (see red), etc. Red is used for the Bar de Pigalle and green for the Notary’s Office. Facing the deep blue of the Mediterranean, Claudel thought, ‘The blue of this sea gives me such a feeling of intensity that only red can give me such a strong sensation.’ Claudel then painted the sea in red on a canvas in the style of the Fauves, using this true colour, but on a psychological rather than photographic level.

I remember the somewhat hallucinatory vision of a Danish painter of our current structures – a bird’s-eye view in the style of Peter Brueghel, but in a landscape where groups of people had given way to a swarm of metallic insects. They were everywhere and of all kinds: small ones lined up neatly in procession, large ones armed and fighting in the distance on land, sea or in the air, in the midst of an exploding universe.

The Danish painter was right too. It is better to look closely at what these custom-made shells are made of, which we enter every day for work, pleasure or death, rather than being acted upon by them without knowing it.

Artists complement, deepen and personalise our view of the world. Of course, in the profusion of their output, not everything is equally acceptable. The sorting will necessarily take place over time. But let us be open and welcoming. And if a work repels us, let us not conclude too quickly that it is meaningless to us.

To see, suffer and love with different eyes and resonate with other consciousnesses is to reveal ourselves to ourselves and acquire a greater reality of being.

TV report about Jacques Riousse

During an exhibition of his works at the Citadelle in Villefranche sur Mer, from 5 February to 8 March 2000, France 3 made an interview with the artist and worker priest Jacques Riousse, which is reproduced here in excerpts. Its publication is intended to keep his memory alive. 

Link to YouTube

The station allowed Jacques Riousse to use the interview in this way, which is what Jacques Riousse asked me to do.

Ludwig Spätling

Jacques Riousse, the redemption of materials

Jean-Michel Bouhours
Jacques Riousse, the redemption of materials

Translation of the article written by Jean-Michel Bouhours in the catalogue ‘ Beautés Insensées, figures, histoires et maître de l’art irrégulier ’. The catalogue was published by Bianca Tosatti at SKIRA, Milan, Paris, pages 104-107 (2006).
The author has given his permission to reproduce his contribution.

‘Art brut is quite simply the art of the raw man,1 wrote Joseph Delteil in a magnum opus: ’Lequel serré Jean Dubuffet. He continued: ‘Which secretes its art like a snail secretes its shell, or, for that matter, like the leaves of a tree, a well-born insect or a stomach in good condition. The raw artist adopts a position that is closed in on itself, almost autistic vis-à-vis an alienating world, from which he protects himself by means of a personal symbolic system. Jacques Rousse was both self-taught and a complete artist: painter, sculptor, glassmaker and builder. More inclined towards mathematics, which he taught at a Jesuit college in Amiens, he had no artistic training and learnt the techniques that would serve him well in his career, such as electric welding and stained glass from craftsmen. Riousse learned what to do, but certainly not what to do with the materials. He was certainly a raw man in the sense in which Dubuffet defined him, that is to say, an individual whose ‘moods and impressions are delivered raw, with their very vivid smells, like eating a herring without cooking it in any way, as soon as it is caught, still dripping with sea water 2. But he was a raw man, with a mission that he had received as soon as he was released from the German prison camps, as a priest-worker. Undoubtedly inhabited by grace, Riousse produced works that attested to the divine presence. Saint Thomas wrote: ‘Let us make it clear that the perfection given to the soul by grace enables it not only to use the gift of creation, but also to enjoy the divine Person 3. Jacques Riousse shares with the other artists of Art Brut a non-referential and wild creation, untouched by any normative teaching. He has broken with society, but this break is neither ideological nor pathological, but pastoral and mystical.

Jacques Riousse, Virgin and Child, 1960, acrylic on wood ; Virgin and Child, n.d., acrylic on metal

The work, which I discovered only very recently 4, was at this precise moment at a turning point in its destiny. His home studio, adjoining the chapel in Saint Martin de Peille where he arrived in 1956, had just been moved. In view of the nature of the studio, all that will remain of Riousse’s work are a few pieces, still just as powerful when they leave the studio, but which will have lost their matrix universe. I was given the opportunity to visit the studio in the state it must have been in when the priest disappeared: a Spartan habitat made up of a series of small rooms in which every object had been ‘the object of his affection’: a water heater, an electric knob, a door handle, a door bore the stigmata of a creative intervention. Riousse painted, drew, glued, clumped, soldered, threaded, nailed and twisted everything within reach of his hands. It would not be a denial of the spiritual dimension of his work to assert that there was certainly a primacy of gesture, of the manuality of things. To paint, Riousse never bought a stretcher with canvas; a coarse jute canvas did the trick. As we continued our tour through the series of small, rather dark rooms that are often found in the small houses of Nice to protect themselves from the summer heat, we came to the studio, which Riousse had built himself, in the style of a favela shack, using salvaged and assembled materials. Two glass façades afforded a sumptuous view of the surrounding valleys.The studio space had been filled by an accumulation of salvaged and immediately transformed objects, finished works and materials for which it will sometimes be difficult to define a status.

Jacques Riousse, Femme nue, gouache on cardboard

The course of life is a repetition of moments, days and situations, and for humans it’s a succession of repetitive gestures, of vital needs being renewed. We produce waste, which we dispose of in such everyday, unimportant ways, because these objects are presumed to have no value or use. There are some people who have a viscerally oppositional relationship with our waste society and who reclaim it more than is reasonable. Riousse was one of these people, turning an accumulation of plastic bottles into a column of life, in the shape of a helix strongly reminiscent of the structure of DNA, which he hung above his head. Because it wasn’t enough for him to fill the floor space, the great height of the studio allowed him to hang curious objects in the third dimension, with a very Dada spirit. Here was a mobile made of wooden coat racks, reminiscent of Obstruction, a famous sculpture by Man Ray from 1920, but which Riousse had almost certainly never seen; there was a ‘cloud’, a cluster of fishing sinkers or electronic components. Machinism had inspired a new aesthetic; post-modern technologies had produced materials such as the microprocessor and the printed circuit, to which artists had shown little interest; in Riousse’s work, a printed circuit becomes the background for a Christ made of twisted sheet metal, and clusters of resistors recall both the swarm and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s utopian architecture. How can we fail to see Picasso or César in these numerous gas burners, which he probably loved for their anthropomorphic potential in his assemblages? Four welded sickles represent the tail of a cockerel: two horseshoes the body. In a white horse made from a common bicycle frame cut and turned upside down, topped with a brake shoe, we find the effectiveness of the pencil line applied to Picasso’s sculpture?
Riousse had worked as a prop maker in the film industry. In this profession, you always have to find an answer to any given situation; he had acquired a plastic gymnastics of the object. Nevertheless, both César and Chamberlain confined themselves to the world of metals: iron, painted sheet metal, copper, brass… whose forms they worked with, figuratively or abstractly. Riousse did not seem to favour any particular material or form, using iron as well as wood, plastic and discarded objects such as a bicycle frame, an electrical socket or the sole of a shoe. Every scrap seemed to be a sign. ‘I like to try everything,’ he says. He was particularly fond of fridge doors, oven trays and paint pot lids as ready-to-use picture frames. He was a junk artist 5, sharing with Rauschenberg, Wolf Vostell or Bruce Conner the same desire to work with waste taken from dustbins or public dumps. For the Americans, the choice was ideological and semiological: to work with what consumer society rejected; it was a form of protest against the presumed nobility of the artistic gesture and a neo-Dada attitude of polemical subversion. ‘To make a painting, a pair of socks is just as good as wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric’, declared Bob Rauschenberg in 1959. In Rauschenberg’s case, the object is integrated into a “combine painting” on the basis of its intrinsic qualities, its semiological charge and its function of use. The object used in a Riousse assemblage loses its original qualities in favour of a function of drawing form; it is immediately integrated into a signified. The artist is often figurative in his assemblages: a wheel flange represents the halo of a saint, a saw blade a jaw, buttons eyes. For Riousse, as for other artists such as Bruce Conner, the use of recycled materials is a response to economic necessity. Moreover, like Bruce Conner, he prefers materials that are in a state of refuse, that have lost the original quality of the manufactured object, and that are freed from their ‘ontological prison’.6 The materials used by Riousse are ‘washed’ of their original function and meaning, and henceforth participate in the construction of a higher symbolic order.

Jacques Riousse, Masque, s. d., assemblage

His Porte de Byzance is a unique assemblage of debris on a door, which was installed in the studio and had its classical functionality. Riousse assembled pieces of painted moulded wood, objects such as a kitchen scouring powder tin, discarded soaps and used soles on which he drew heads.

The work has a morbid character; each shoe still seems to bear the trace of a life gone by. But the artist has taken the idea of death conveyed by the object as a starting point, to represent the spiritual path from the bottom to the top, from death to resurrection, from decay to spiritual paradise, pointed out by these shoes and soles in ascent, on the vertical plane of the support.
The gesture of restoring the lost object has a genuine spiritual significance. It is a way of affirming the primacy of vital energy over the fate of death, of ‘renouncing the fatality of decay’.7


The alchemy of the artistic act transforms the ‘lead’ material destined to disappear into the sacred gold of eternity. Each time Riousse transforms one of these objects, he produces a kind of redemption of matter, an allegory of the resurrection promised by Christ. His works made with shrapnel from the last war, salvaged from the slopes of Mont Agel, above Monte Carlo, where violent artillery battles took place, demonstrate the symbolic significance conferred by the artist on the history of the material. The shattered shell – ‘a satanic explosion’ – is of course the trace of war and its destruction, both human and material; Riousse transmutes them into sacred figures: a Madonna or a Holy Family.

Jacques Riousse, Couple, s. d., cut and welded shrapnel
View of Jacques Riousse’s studio in Saint-Martin de Peille

The Nouveaux Réalistes claimed the transcendence of reality (through the object): Riousse tends to show that divine grace is to be found, against all odds, in the most wretched object, once it has lost its homology.
Riousse’s painting is more expressionist, his sculpture Picassian or surrealist, his assemblages reminiscent of the sculptures of Karel Appel or Bruce Conner. This apparent eclecticism of style seems to represent the chaos of the contemporary world. From Art Brut, Jacques Riousse adopted the absolute freedom, the Dionysian pleasure of making, the truculence of the sharp line, but from the chaos always emerge the archetypal forms of religious sculpture and painting, because his proliferating artistic creation remained in perfect harmony with his vision of the priesthood.

Footnotes
1 Delteil J., ‘ L’homme brut ’ Cahiers de l’Herne, Paris, n° 22, May 1973, p. 166 reproduced in Abadie D., Jean Dubuffet, Paris, éd. du Centre Pompidou, 2001, p.30-31.
2 Ibid.
3 Saint Thomas Aquinas, preface and translation by R. P Mennesier, Paris, Aubier Éd Montaigne, 1942, p. 99.
4 Through Nathalie Rosticher, who showed me the chapel of Saint Martin de Peille, and then through Robert and Mireille Fillon, who introduced me to the members of the Association des Amis de J. Riousse: M. et M™* Alain Coussement, Genies Imbert and Anne Riousse.
5 This Anglo-Saxon term refers to the early work of Jasper
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
6 Bataille G., ‘Matérialisme’ in Documents, n° 3, Paris, 1929. Quoted by R.
Krauss and Y.-A. Bois, L’Informe. Mode d’emploi. ‘Bas matérialisme’, Paris, éd. du Centre Pompidou, 1996, p. 50.
7 These words were underlined by Riousse on the leaflet for an exhibition organised in Strasbourg in 1970 entitled Récup’ Art.

A Messenger of Light

Un Messager de lumière (par Anne Zali)

The child’s eyes are wide open, he’s burning, his face expresses nameless pain, his cry in the silence is a deafening clamour. He raises his hand as if to stop something. And she, his mother, is beside him, all her love powerless to prevent something from shattering. Yet the obscure light of her gaze seems to glimpse beyond the devastated earth, the distraught softness of a shore.

For more than fifty years now, this Virgin and Child has been with me, and it has lost none of its heartbreaking humanity or its power of hope, ever since that distant day when Jacques Riousse saw me fascinated by his painting and said to me, “Take it away!”)

ill.1 Virgin and Child, painting on canvas, sd (sd=undated), private collection, AZ

I met him in the 70s, one Sunday at mass in Saint Martin de Peille, where I was accompanying my parents, and was taken by the light of the place, its particular transparency and the beauty of the surrounding mountains. On the square in front of the chapel, he was welcoming the few faithful, the wind was blowing the scent of lavender and sun-drenched hills and it seemed to me that the whole world was dancing around this man and that his blue eye, so blue, had caught a huge piece of the sky.

Living in saint Martin de Peille

And I came back to see him, on foot from Monaco, taking the little path from La Turbie that climbed through the olive groves and mint trees. For me, my stays at Saint Martin de Peille became moments of freedom, open to the Unforeseeable. Everything contributed to a sense of bohemia and adventure: there was the teeming bric-a-brac of the studio, lit by huge windows through which the mountains came in, this prodigious mess where the most unlikely objects were side by side, ghostly coat racks, scraps of wood, coral, scuba diving, metal, pottery, sculptures, canvases, stained glass. It was as if the universe had invited itself there at the time of its genesis, or rather its eruption! Jacques Riousse created as he breathed; he gathered, picked, tinkered as if he had been given the task by the Eternal to endlessly transform the debris of scattered, broken matter, to engulf it with the breath of the Spirit, its vehemence, and the flow of its inexhaustible inventiveness.

There were also the long evenings under the lamp, when he would talk and talk, endlessly delving into his memories, about his experience as a young maths teacher, his three years in the deportation camp, the weddings he had celebrated in the mountains, the films he had made with Abel Gance… Meals always had something miraculous about them: he would open the fridge door and throw himself enthusiastically into some daring mixtures, which he would then throw into a frying pan quickly cleaned with newspaper. The results were sometimes surprising, but always interesting!

There was still the magic of the rooms he had carved out of the rock where he piled mattresses and canvases! My favourite was the Lusignan Room, with its sad clown and two serious children getting married holding a large lily, on the edge of an almost completely destroyed town, watched by a little dog brimming with consolation…

Lastly, there was the indefinable imprint of all those travellers, artists and non-artists alike, from the four winds of the planet, who had found helpful hospitality with him: penniless painters, Russian aristocrats in exile, a Chinese priest, men and women of all ages in search of the meaning of their lives (at Saint Martin de Peille, at any time of the day or year, there was a place to eat and a mattress available!)

In between several visits to his ‘parishioners’ or the museums of Nice and Antibes, I remember with particular fondness the enchantment of that early morning in Cap d’Ail. The sun was still brand new and the sea had that warm, restful smell of summer mornings. When we reached the end of the red rocks, we spent a long time looking at the seabed, the basaltic purples and the incredible transparency of the water bathed in light, the phosphorescence of the blues and greens and the flash of tiny fish. As if in a dream of wonder, he had evoked the beginnings of the world, “when the earth, he said, was still just an immense meadow of blue seaweed”…

On another occasion, we went to see some friends whose daughter was ill somewhere far away in the mountains. I remember a long journey in his legendary 2CV. In the evening, at the wake, he had recounted Giono’s novel “Que ma joie demeure” with great animation, dwelling on the end, the moment when Bobi separates from Aurore to join his solitary destiny and experience a form of ultimate illumination in death: “…and the lightning stabbed him between the two shoulders with a great knife of blue light…”. I think he had a prodigious memory, but what struck me at the time was the very special fervour of his relationship with Bobi, Bobi the Amazed, the Solitary, Bobi his brother!

A Messenger

He was a being of light. I remember his acute face, the intense blue of his eyes, his silhouette anchored to the ground against a mountain backdrop, his living hands always at work. (ill.2)

ill.2 Jacques Riousse, photo from the 1980s?

His presence is stocky, the colour of rock. He is a man of solitude and strong winds, his gestures are wide, and when he speaks he brings to life the long swell of human history, so fragile under the gaze of eternity. He is filled with vertigo and an acute sense of the relativity of everything. He has separated himself, withdrawn from the games of power and money, and ironises willingly about the pitfalls of wealth. He wonders about poverty in the Church and the dissociation between individual poverty and… collective wealth. He often said that if he had lived in the Middle Ages, he would have become a Franciscan.

He has a radical intransigence, an acute sense of truth and a secret incandescence. It’s as if something of him were buried in the whirlpool of the galaxies, talking to the stars…

He’s a cosmic man, full of rivers and pebbles (he liked to remember that ‘riousse’ came from ‘rivus’, which in Cicero’s time meant ‘little stream’).

His shadow is lost in the black flame of the cypress trees.
He was a whistleblower before his time, a prophet who rebuked injustice and hypocrisy.
He carries with him the experience of the camps. In that nakedness, he acquired a knowledge of mankind and strengthened a few solid principles: “the rich create the poor”, “you are rich with everything you don’t need to live” and others that I have forgotten.
There remained in him something of the teacher anxious to pass on: through the secret channels of a living pedagogy that belonged to him alone…

Today, when I dream of him, I see him standing on his little terrace below in the vibrant heat of summer, surrounded by the song of the cicadas, busy assembling pieces of metal, bringing disjointed universes together, welding the improbable, his own strong and joyful way of celebrating the world, the fragile alliance of the living; his own playful way of joining in the dance of creatures. This is how I see him, inseparable from that gold, absorbed in the work of his hands, radiating a distant light.

Mass there

Or he’s standing in front of his church, planted like a rock among the olive trees. His eyes so clear. The wind blows-or perhaps the Spirit. The traveller senses that he has arrived in a very inhabited place. It’s Sunday, just before 10 o’clock. He rings the bell, waking up all the surrounding hills. The call vibrates for a long time in the clear air. Today no one will come. He says, “It doesn’t matter, I’ll say mass inside”. Indoors, that is, in the delightful mess of his living room. The only faithful member of the family, I’m sitting in the armchair of a beat-up old 2CV, where I’ve finally found a little free space. At his back, large expressionist paintings with emaciated faces and huge feverish eyes imbued with immense pain. In the centre, in pale lighting, a man who must be Christ stands out against a red and black wall, raising his left hand towards a very pale sun, holding a piece of bread with a hole in it in his right hand. He is waving like a sailor on a voyage, lost far away in the sea breeze. His eyes are filled with bright stars, and he is opening a path of overwhelming innocence. His prayer is a cry (ill.3)

ill.3) Last Supper, painting on canvas, sd)

The years have gone by and this painting still crystallises for me the living soul of the place, listening to a world in danger; I continue to hear in it the strength of a call, the presence of a wind that is not from here. I “hear” it as a testament of fire… An invitation to set out on our journey…

(ill.4 Pélerins d’Emmaüs, painting on canvas, sd)

Little by little, it seems to me that we are not alone in the celebration of this strange Eucharistic liturgy, and that their silent voices, charged with invisible presences, share in the mystery of his offering. Sometimes he pauses to recite snatches of a great cosmic meditation, he dreams with his eyes wide open, the whole history of the world surges through his words, transforming the darkness of a small, dishevelled room into the dawn of another world where time no longer exists.

The memory of her in my mind today merges with the laughter of the light, with the tireless singing of the crickets and cicadas, with everything that says it’s summer there, with an impatience to be in the world and the certainty that we’re just passing through, with a feeling of exile, of solitude, of vertigo but also of mad immersion in the dance of the living. With the intensity of a stained-glass window, her presence continues to shine like the lamp of a refuge lit in the middle of the mountain, her voice has the colours of hope, she opens up the inexhaustible possibilities of play, she whispers in our ear that there is for each of us to seize our own existence, to go to the end of our dream, to dare the freedom of our singular path.

A work in tune with the times

His work, in its religious dimension, takes on its full meaning in the historical context of the hopes kindled by the Fondation de la Mission de France and the creation of the workers’ priests: a desire to get closer to the world of work and the poorest people, to vigorously rediscover the evangelical demands formulated by the Beatitudes. The consistency of his artistic approach emerges in his use of poor materials, always salvaged, humble kitchen or gardening tools, worn, broken, destroyed, often linked to the traces of war, grenades, shrapnel, metal helmets (picked up in the surrounding hills)… We can also see the impetus of redemption that drives all these sculptures, which seem to be carried away by an irresistible dance, a wind of cosmic lightness, as they enter a second life.

In its human dimension, it echoes the distress of its century and can be read against a backdrop of historical tragedy, but it always opens a window to hope, a space for the light of the heart.

Somewhere he wrote: “The artist is not separate. He participates in the common life, but more sensitively, he picks up its imperceptible tremors with many antennae, he perceives the forces, the currents, the waves that run through it. It listens to man’s calls and anxieties. It intuitively grasps his deepest aspirations, his unspoken desires. Then he withdraws a little from the noisy crowd (…) The artist, then in a state of clairvoyance, suddenly grasps by penetrating to the heart of beings the secret relationships that he had been guessing for a long time without being able to reach them” (“Dialogue de l’Artiste avec son temps”, “Conférences de la Salle Saint-Dominique”, sd).

That’s how the solitude of her studio, like a marvellous shell, became filled with presences and voices, and allowed itself to be permeated by the murmur of these faces, the irruption of these currents of energy. And so, in her own dented way, she began to welcome the song of the world. If there is something deeply moving in her work, it lies in this transfiguration of what is most damaged, neglected, despised, in a state of disrepair, in this inexhaustible fervour for transformation that animates her hands.

“Man’s battles, shrapnel, from now on be no more than the Madonna of Peace”.

Art brut?

In a fine article published in the catalogue of the “Beautés insensées” exhibition in 2006, Jean Marie Bouhours refers to his work as “art brut” and “homme brut” in Dubuffet’s sense of the term, i.e. a man whose “moods and impressions are delivered raw, with their very vivid smells, like eating a herring, without cooking it in any way, as soon as it is caught, still dripping with sea water”. He sees in his work “a non-referential and wild creation, devoid of any normative teaching” whose aim is “pastoral and mystical”.
For my part, I’m not sure that we can really speak as he does of “a position closed in on itself, almost autistic in relation to an alienating world, from which it protects itself thanks to a personal symbolic system”. On the contrary, it seems to me that his studio, with its huge picture windows through which the beauty of the world flowed, was a mysterious sounding board where the whole universe vibrated in the tumult of its forms emerging in great disorder, in an irresistible contagion. It seems to me that his approach, all discretion and modesty, was guided more by the extreme freedom accorded to objects in their irregular, rough, uncalibrated materiality, which certainly led him towards unbridled creations in the sense that no consideration of conformity to an aesthetic canon could impede their outpouring, restrain their boundless plasticity.

 Art brut, yes, in the sense that his energy is that of a passion for recycling that takes everything – iron, wood, plastic, from the burner to the coat rack, not forgetting the soleplate, the skimmer, the iron or the bicycle saddle – in a movement of transformation, of reinvention in the course of a baptism of fire achieved by his legendary welding… His logic is that of a “divine do-it-yourselfer” who grabs hold of everything that passes through his hands and never ceases to accommodate the debris and lame remains of a Creation damaged by History. It’s his way of being part of the dramas of his time, and with such fervour. He’s a man who listens deeply, and I’m not sure that what he’s giving us here are his ‘raw impressions’. I see it more as a turbulent fresco drawn by a little people who are by turns childlike, belligerent, candid, boastful, dreamers and prophets, digging up the nocturnal archives of the human adventure.

Alive with insolence

Life has left its mark on them in the form of wounds, battles more or less lost, and everything that has transformed, deformed or enlarged them, but they are alive, alive with insolence…
Shepherd or warrior sounding the alarm, leading the way (ill.5)

ill.5 Figure d’homme avec un bâton, sculpture fer, sd

They sometimes emerge from a slow stupor, standing with their white stones like little altars of memory (ill.6).

ill. 6 Visage d’enfant, sculpture fer avec cailloux blancs, sd

Sometimes they remember, unless they are dreaming, resting on one foot on the edge of the night while an immense butterfly flies from their heart, its wings overflowing (ill.7 ).

ill.7 Figure of Pierrot balancing on one foot, iron sculpture, sd

Sentinelles postées sur la ligne de crête : annoncent-elles l’aurore, de quelle lointaine planète oubliée nous font-elles signe ? (ill.8)

ill. 8 Animal figure, sculpture in iron, sd

Do they know something we might have lost? Don’t they have mysterious antennae? (ill.9 )

ill. 9 Virgin and Child, iron sculpture, sd

(ill.10 bis and 10) Male figure with antennae, iron sculpture, sd and 10 bis Balancing dancer, iron sculpture, sd )

ill.11 Female figure waving a sign, iron sculpture, sd

They form an unbroken chain of transmission (ill.12 Nativity, iron sculpture, sd), and with what gentleness, what tender solicitude it sometimes happens that the Elder protects the first steps of the one who still seems to be hesitating!

(ill.12 Nativity, iron sculpture, sd)

They form an unbroken chain of transmission (ill.12 Nativity, iron sculpture, sd), and with what gentleness, what tender solicitude it sometimes happens that the Elder protects the first steps of the one who still seems to be hesitating! (ill.13 Figure of a man guiding a child, iron sculpture, sd)

(ill.13 Figure of a man guiding a child, iron sculpture, sd)

ill.14 Figure of a dancing woman, iron sculpture, sd

They wave to us in a wind that is not from here

A few dates

-birth in Neuilly on 17 March 1911

-1914: his father is mobilised

-1924: he discovers Pascal’s Pensées

-1929: his father dies. Jacques works for a central heating company

-1932: teaches mathematics at a private college in Saint Martin de Pontoise, then in Amiens, where he attends the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and takes classes with Henri Lerondeau.

-1938: he discovered the thought of Teilhard de Chardin

-September 1939: he was drafted

-4 June 1940: captured by the Germans at Dunkirk and transferred to Pomerania. It was in the camp that he learned of Cardinal Suhard’s creation of the Mission de France. He was released in 1943 as a nurse.

-1944: he began studying theology

-March 1948: Cardinal Suhard ordained him a priest in Lisieux. He worked as a working priest in the Joinville film studios as an electrician, prop-maker and assistant director.

-1954: He chose to submit to the Roman decisions that put an end to the experiment with worker priests.

He learnt the art of stained glass, welding and blacksmithing.

-1957: He moved to Saint Martin de Peille, in the partially unfinished chapel built by the Nice architect Buzzi. He added stained glass windows to the bell tower, sculptures and paintings, and built his studio below the chapel to the south.

-2004: He died at the age of 93 in Peille, where he is buried.

Translation by help of DeepL