.

48 rue Hippolyte-Maindron. my arrival
at his studio is somewhat apprehensive,
a warm baguette and fresh brie in hand.
small offerings to nourish the silence if
it hovers. inside, the room is grey. rey
walls, grey floor, grey clay, even his
skin. grey. perhaps in sympathy with his
materials, he also wears the colour of
dust. but the heavy sweet smell of linseed
oil hangs in the air, its half-empty bottle
of yellow-gold collecting light from the
exposed bulb overhead which sways by
a single ceiling cord. it is umbilical.

two canvases lean against the wall near
his sculpture stand and from them, three
monochromatic figures walk towards me
with intense acuity. relentlessly moving
away from some undefined depth in the
canvas. I imagine his paint brush wrapping
frenetic lines around each form as if to
pull them off the surface, off and away
from the moment that fixes them to their
incessant flatness. he draws them from
the inside out, layering lines as if to
model mass across an armature like
muscle across bone. and if he could
draw them through the air to defy the
logic of space he would. but what he
desires is the impossible, to sculpt
with paint. I get that.

in t/his modest room, paintings and sculpture
are intimately connected. to be here is to
feel intrusive, voyeuristic. it is Sunday at
noon and he has just risen. I can feel his
eyes wrapping around me, mapping contours
with imaginary bands that strain beyond
the measurable. arabesque lines of wordless
thought. I catch him nodding his head with
slight approval, a half smile.

"I did them last night. from memory. also
some sketches, but they're no good.", he
hesitates. "want to see them?"

his speech is somewhat harsh, almost
that of a labourer, maybe a steel worker.
he deliberately plays with intonation,
taking pleasure in modelling each word
as close to ordinary convention as possible,
to deliberately strip pretense from his
process. I wonder just how far he had
to wander away from his Swiss upbringing
to breach these figures, these expressions.
he adds,

"sometimes I'm surprised I was so good
and sometimes that I missed the mark so
far. but of course when drawing them,
one sees them in an entirely different
way, one sees their mood rather than
their form."

bottles of spent turps clutter the top
of an old wooden table and under it,
coated in dust, is a small clay figure.
I warn him that someone could
accidentally kick it over.

"ìf its`s really strong it will show
itself even if I hide it.", he explains.

his eyes smile.

he opens a box, removes a few drawings;
I know he only draws on cheap paper
with dark pen or pencil and can almost
hear the muffled tone of his pencil line.
its granitically soft sound, linear
excursions of smudgy grey. I repeat
the word granitic again and again,
take pleasure in it, surrender to it.
gra-ni-tic. hard g, hard c. meanwhile,
he shuffles through the box to find
one particular drawing which contains
a small figure placed at the bottom
of a huge white sheet.

"I'm not happy with it, but it's the
first time I've dared to do that."

what he refers to is his emphasis
on negative space, white space
dramatically dwarfing his figure.
the enormity of an empty surface
crushing down on such a tiny frame
as if to extract its solitude; it
is the most irreducible part of
anyone, that which is exactly
equivalent to everyone else and
this is what he deliberately looks
for in others, some secret royalty
we all bear that binds us to a
profound incommunicability. this
is what he wants to draw into
everything. the paradoxical
knowledge that what draws us
to in the other, one's unassailable
singularity, is untouchable.

it is not unlike the experience of
knowing someone across time and space
without ever having met. after a while,
after so much time has passed, one
develops a sense of familiarity that
can (mis)lead one into saying things
that perhaps push limits to test
boundaries. although not a conscious
act, it is that overwhelming urge to
stretch what it is to its undefinable
l/edge just to see what will happen.
will it last or will it merely snap
and disappear? this fragility. as if
to ask if it is genuine. it's not that
one wants to bring about its ending.
far from it! instead, what one craves
is to reach that unassailable depth
in the other person allthewhile knowing
how far away it really is and that it
can't be reached the way things are.

like trying to sculpt with paint.
like the space of Giacometti's canvases
but also like knowing that whatever it
withstands and for however long it lasts,
it is, and always has been, nothing short
of beautiful, in a hanunting kind of way.
even if it sounds clichéd to say, it is
both things at once. both bold and fragile,
gentle and cruel, touching and elusive,
light and dark. near and far. it is the
thrill of unattainable opposites entangled
in the genuine desire to distill something
real from the ether, to assign some depth
to its moments which otherwise remain
trapped in flat lines like Vermeer's
sunlight-on-canvas, like Giacometti's
figures-on-paper. perhaps what I
want is to push the boundaries
past the unassailable solitude of
it. a paradox that is ultimately,
also, a gift.

it is what it is.

I have been trying to write these words
for days. intending rather unsuccessfully
to get at exactly what it is that craves
expression. but today, one of Giacometti's
favourite remarks surfaces from memory. and
although it may be of no lasting consequence,
if indeed the band has already snapped and
disappeared, nonetheless, I repeat it all
day long to acknowledge the distance he
dares to risk to defy the logic of this
space. I appreciate his pursuit inspite
of my own flat-line limitations. but most
of all (and knowing how I can lose myself
in details), I repeat these words, if
only to heed his advice.

"You have to value [il faut valoriser]."
(Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966)