Robert Couturier, in his 100th year

When photographing a work of sculpture, I consider myself as an interpreter more than an author, like a musician relating to a score or a translator to a text. I am aware that despite my respect for a three-dimensional art-piece, I can only convey a few of its aspects, because by choosing a particular light, a shooting angle and a focal length I shall inevitably neglect other possibilities. The best I can hope is that my interpretation will serve as an opening, encouraging the viewer to look at the original and to discover some of its remaining facets.

In the present photographic essay on Robert Couturier's sculptures (just as in my two preceding projects, Sculptures by Degas, published 1991 by Imprimerie Nationale, and Romanesque Figures, published 2001 by Le Seuil), my first intention was to find such an opening, even though, having crossed the threshold, I went a bit further by trying to find a common denominator between the sculptor's different productions, to understand the connections between them and to refer my impressions to other visual experiences.

In the case of the Degas' statuettes, the common denominator seemed to be the artist's awareness of gravity, as a kind of umbilical cord connecting all living bodies to the earth and feeding them with it's vital sap, in spite of their continual and pathetic efforts to brake lose, as if claiming their right to verticality and their desire for movement. Hence the seeming hesitation of a dancer poised on the toe-tips of one foot, as if ready to fly off, while being in fact irremediably tied to her pedestal. Or the contrast between the rearing stallion's powerful frame and the fragility of the two forelegs sustaining him, or the touching clumsiness of a pregnant young woman, balancing her belly above her heels, like a heavy fruit on an all too thin stalk.

In the world of romanesque sculpture (which of course cannot be compared to Degas' oeuvre, as it includes the work of many artists, from various backgrounds and with different degrees of skill, during a period of more than two centuries and in a wide geographical area) the most obvious common denominator is the contrast between the relatively crude technique of these anonymous creators and their recklessly ambitious project to represent the whole cosmos - or what they believed it to be: God and man, heaven and hell, saints and sinners, animals and plants, past and present, virtue and vice, reality and fantasy... Their overflowing imagination (or their naive faith) made them populate the gates, the roofs, the capitals and the ceilings of their churches with a Divine Comedy in stone. We cannot help being moved by this explosion of inventiveness, even if we don't share the beliefs of their age.

In the case of the present essay on Robert Couturier's sculptures, I couldn't disregard the fact that when we first met he was nearly hundred years old, and that some of the work that most impressed me was recent: "He who lives to a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed."(Isiah 65:20). As if mutations and ripening were the very essence of his art, and if fate had felt obliged to grant him the time he needed.

No doubt Couturier wants us to share his sense of humour; no doubt he knows, as a well-known French curator, Jean Leymarie, rightly pointed out," how to suggest maximal meanings by minimal means"; no doubt clothespins are to be found anywhere and all of them look alike - but possibly it took the long and well filled lifetime of a great artist to be able to pick this particular one and to recognize the horsiness of its grin (1993); or to see a bonze's kimono in these remains of a rubber ball (2000), or to spot, in this piece of plastic retrieved from a bin, the miraculous curve of A blonde's back (1983)!

There are some connections that I perceive more clearly through a viewfinder than by the naked eye (just as some objects, when isolated against a backdrop, seem to produce their own imaginary universe). Take the Saint Sebastian (1999): it's not that Couturier, by setting this piece of wood on a pedestal and hammering four nails into the right spots, has "made it" into the arrow-pierced martyr! Far from it! The tragedy was played out long ago and recorded in these very wooden fibres, waiting only for some artist's clairvoyance to be revealed - which is exactly what Couturier did, adding simply those four nails and the pedestal, as an additional bonus for the viewer, or in order to make up for our lack of imagination. The same is true for the Penitent (or Bishop, 1987), already half drained of his contrition, just as the tube of paint that in fact it is, the screw-top used up by its owner's changes of mind. It wasn't enough, for Couturier, to just pick it up and place it against a black slab of wood, he had to recognised it since the beginning of its agony and pity it at every stage of his way to the Cross! And, of course, the Self-portrait-Paintbrush (1993)! I couldn't contemplate it through the viewfinder without being tempted to wink back! Why can't I make my own self-portrait as an ancient camera, with used film pouring out of my guts?

"These are but jokes and anecdotes!" objected some friends, who had come to see Couturier's work in my daylight studio, but seemed more attracted by his earlier bronzes. At the time I didn't dare contradicting them, having myself a feeble for the Spread-out legs (1947) and the Philosopher (1950). But what about Feminin Torso (1993)? To be sure, it's just a piece of driftwood found on a beach, the sculptor added only the rudimentary pedestal and the crayon marks, like a smile, under the belly button. Or did he also burn those fire-marks, reminding of curly pubic hair? No doubt a great part of Couturier's work - to quote again Leymarie - "celebrates the young female body, as the very essence of sculptural art and the inexhaustible wonder of the universe." In the case of the Torso, this celebration isn't encumbered by prudery: at the junction between the two branches, the slit in the wood becomes a vagina, its folds converge like wrinkles of the flesh, the hollow beyond it, that one cannot help imagining, must be the starting point of all growth, the cradle of all beginning and the end of all quest.

When facing this transfiguration of wood into flesh one is reminded of the alchemies In Elstir's marina, as imagined by Proust, in which "the masts seem to grow from the ground, whereas the churches of Criquebeque appear to emerge straight out of the water... The charm consists in a kind of metamorphosis, not unlike a poetic metaphor... One might say that if God the Father created things by naming them, Elstir recreates them by taking away their names and replacing them with other ones....When facing reality, his endeavour is to strip himself bare of all intelligent notion, as if to become ignorant for the sake of his painting, to forget all he knows by a kind of honesty, all too well aware that we are not the legitimate owners of our knowledge."

(From Marcel Proust, " À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs", part II.)