STRENGTH

GABRIELLE CONILH DE BEYSSAC

        ‘’Drawing is a verb»: the idea that drawing is an action underlies, according to Richard Serra, the practice of sculpture, of which he defines the limits by a list of verbs at the beginning of his career in 1967. For Gabrielle Conilh de Beyssac, who addressed sculpture with a certain minimalist approach, the operations of giving shape to the matter are central and she wants them to be simple - to cut, to roll, to fold, to weld -, visible even in the final realization. She defines them by drawing them and she entrusts them to craftsmen when they require a particular equipment, because of the dimensions she plans to give them, or because of the precision that she aims at, when it comes to cuttings. In the Verblist, two of them are related to drawing (to mark and to erase), and most of them refer to actions to be performed on the materials, except for a few (“to collapse”, “to cast”, “to turn”, “to rotate”, “to take”, “rebound”) that can be understood as the actual shape describing a movement resulting from external forces, such as gravity. As for the curve or the folds, which the sculptor uses in her last works in painted steel, the bending or the twisting allow to go from the plane surface to the volume, to get a new shape while keeping the former one visible, in order to mark them with the tensions of a potential mobility.This is precisely what allowed Lygia Clark to free herself from the surface of the painting and to get the viewer to activate the geometry himself: her Bichos - simple shapes cut in metal and assembled with hinges – open or close in several ways, and their balance is as tangible as it is likely to be broken – the animality carried by the title suggesting these particular animated forms.

         Carminhando (1963) marks out the breaking point in Lygia Clark’s work – a paper strip cut in the shape of a Möbius ribbon, this continuous surface that suggests infinity, the inside and outside of which can be seen simultaneously. The act is its core, especially since the two lines (the incision and what it creates) are assimilated, by the title, to the walk, which puts in relation the body in movement and the crossed-cut space. The walk which is a line, and in this respect, is related to the drawing, as Tim Ingold writes in Lines: A Brief History: “the wayfarer is continuously moving. He is, strictly speaking, his movement. […] in the world, the wayfarer is fulfilled in the form of a travelling line.” The drawings made by Gabrielle Conilh de Beyssac with a potter’s wheel singularly engage movement: not only because the regular circularity becomes a symbolic form of it, but also because the sheet turns and the hand also moves, that the two circles further suggest a movement of drive, the ink spreading from one to the other with each passage (Circles), that finally the spirals become clearer as the drop of ink, which is used to shape them, is drained (Spirals), just as the chalks become thinner as they draw lines on the paper (Partitions). The action is always reciprocal, and both parts are affected by it – this word can be understood in all its meanings.

         These two superimposed and interlocked circles could be plans for sculptures related to this 2012 Couple-Oloïde, just as they could be outlines formed by another one: like Rocking, made the same year. Once set in motion, the two notched disks, embedded in each other, can draw on the floor - provided it is loose - a pattern made of staggered half-circles. Produced before or after, for or by the volume, the drawing does not cease to return in the work of the sculptor and the sculpture to return there, that this one therefore cuts the flatness of the wall (Regard Bis, Pin-up), traces elevations in space, splits and Gaps, or even its way of resting on the ground, balancing on edges, indicates a possible setting in motion, one imagines it, on an oscillatory mode launched by an impulse. And one thinks of Richard Long’s first sculpting gesture, which he made in a Wiltshire meadow one day in 1967, this Line made by Walking which represented for him a new form of sculpture as well as a new way of walking: like the walk, the drawing is an oscillation; like the drawing, the walk is a projection in a space that is as physical as it is mental, the straight line drawn by Richard Long with his feet while treading the grass simultaneously defining the horizontal plane of the ground and the horizon closed by the vertical trees, as well as direction and time.

         And if the works of Gabrielle Conilh de Beyssac obviously engage the body in the space, by their dimensions, their materiality and especially by the actions they execute and the movements they draw in it, it is in a constant back and forth with a much more abstract or immaterial world, the one of the forms and the ideas taking form in the tangible. In 1968-69, so about 2 years after the exhibition « Eccentric Abstraction » organised by Lucy Lippard in New York, Raoul Hausmann supported the idea of “developing a new image that would link the idea with the material, or an “eccentric sensibility””: eccentric because it enhances the vision with the informations of the other senses, especially the touch (in this case, the qualities of the different materials, as well as the traces of cuts and welds that become scars, bulges in the metal skins), but also the sound (implied by the metal or produced by the friction). The eccentric is also clearly about center: through drawings on paper (drawn around a center), cut forms (that spread the centers) and folded shapes (that imply, to be balanced, a center of gravity), the space and the body are decentered, moved towards the chaotic agitation of the Partitions, though sometimes harmonized in the common elaboration of movements, which constitute so many lines, tracings, thoughts, echoes and inner movements that are the very matter of the emotion.