Born in 1957 in Mont-de-Marsan (FR)
Lives and works in Biarritz (FR)
1994
Casting, silver-plated copper
Hauteur : 70 cm, diamètre : 20 cm
Year of Purchase: 1997
Diaphanous apparitions, subtle evocations of objects and places gone for ever, past events, the works of Pascal Convert bring into play the process of memory and disappearance. Imprints of objects and spaces, drawings and installations offer a sensitive response to a society characterized by speed, information overload and forgetfulness. There is no nostalgia in his approach, but the will to reinvest time, to underline the ephemeral, through archival images or in the style of the archaeological investigation, in order to ‘construct a memory in the negative and incised.’1 Indeed, ‘far from some positivist thought piling up evidence and testimony, [the artist] performs a subtraction of images’2: fragments of reportages that whiten until the image becomes illegible and loses its inform¬ative character in the video Direct/Indirect (1997); Basque villas of the 1930s due for demolition and the memory and remains of which survive through the extreme refinement of the drawings, cut-outs and casts produced by the artist (Reconstitution, 1991; Pièce rouge, 1996, etc.).
So many memento mori pieces highlight absence and reveal emptiness while paradoxically exhibiting the essence of things. This aesthetics of emptying and purging extends into the series of casts of the artist’s body (face, arm) – the Sculpture non attribuée (Unattributed sculpture), an imprint of a left leg, is the material trace of the body, stamped with the seal of time. While the technique (wax casting) and the material (silver-plated copper) refer to traditional sculpture, the way it is presented is radically different. The work is not erected, it sinks into the floor of the exhibition, revealing to the viewer only the gaping hole of the empty cast.
By showing what is normally concealed, Pascal Convert puts in place of the volume of the isolated limb the perception of a crevice, which undermines our understanding of the object. The artist plays with a ‘rigorous heuristics of fullness and emptiness, of up and down, of horizontality and verticality, of the reverse and the obverse.’2 We are not in the immediate or the obvious; the work does not present itself to be seen, it offers itself up to the imagination and memory. A metaphor for human presence, implicit in the volume of this body inscribed in hollowed-out form, the cast of a leg is reminiscent of the ex-votos placed in rivers at cult sites in the hope of a cure. Paradoxically, underlying this is the idea of a trap, a visual and physical trap.
Pascal Convert toys with the dialectics of presence and absence, the self-portrait and universality, between the physical dimension and evocative power. What is drawn in hollowed-out form with this cast is the work of time, the idea of loss, burial, of ‘partial disappearance, as it exhibits and lends value, not to what it buries
[ … ] but to the very fact that it is burying something or someone, and thereby becomes the memorial, the visual remnant of the disappearance’.3
Hélène Guenin
1 Pascal Convert, ‘Comment voir pourrait devenir toucher’, 23 February 2000.
2 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘La demeure (apparentement de l’artiste)’, in Pascal Convert, œuvres de 1986 à 1992. Capc Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, 1992, p. 37.
3 Georges Didi-Huberman, La demeure, la souche (apparentements de l’artiste), Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1999, p. 117.