MAM Paris, 1978
DONUT FLIGHT: A TITLE THAT WOULD ALSO BE AN INVITATION
(article extracted from the exhibition catalog)
The Jacquet exhibition today at the ARC is much more than a “retrospective” type of hanging which would tend to revive the brilliant image of the young first of the 1960s. His insolent “Games” of colored words and other “Camouflages” then made the beautiful evenings of artistic Paris by defying the history of art in its foundations best established by the mechanical multiplication of the image (the objectivity of the subject, the uniqueness of the work, its artisanal realization) and led to all the routs (cf. the manifestation perceived as “poor art” at the Galerie Yvon Lambert in 1969).
The developments of the “Great Work” which he has been pursuing for several years were to revive the misinterpretations and mistakes of the critics. The CRA will only present the premises, the work being in progress.
But for those who, like us, will have discovered Jacquet from this work of syntheses, some of the elements of which had been shown in Venice in 1976, or even, through the tiny “sculpture” in four primordial elements already presented at the CNAC in 1974 , the development of his approach will demonstrate a rare coherence: from the backgammon game whose rules, despite verbal pirouettes and apparent casualness, impose an extremely concerted rigor, all shots abolish chance. At most, we can say with the Churn, for example, that the importance of a work is measured by the very ones that it cancels, or better still, that it re-locates.
Jacquet wanted to affirm this fundamental cohesion here by designing the presentation according to a very precise, almost pedagogical scheme, a sort of initiatory journey whose center is the “Point de Repère”, itself placed in the exact axis of the “Earth in space” thereby locating its place, that of a “planetary consciousness”.
This frame, as tight as it is light (donut flight, etc.) does not claim to capture the reality of the work more than the various screenings of his paintings circumscribe their subjects, but, quite simply, his own game and his multiple camouflages.
Two routes (from the beginning or the end) are therefore offered to the visitor: interchangeable in their meaning and their functioning, their routes develop in relation to the Point located in the middle. Two routes, two readings also, at least, on both sides of the line of sight: one uses the level of knowledge and optical perception of the viewer, the other, more intuitive, to what Jacquet calls his “level of consciousness”.
The first alone can be reduced to the verbal description. It leads us to a sculptural explanation of the image from different sets of colors on various supports in plan and volume:
– brilliant exercises of juxtaposition and superposition of the primary and secondary colors which evolve towards the synthetic reduction with the only trichromy, then, with black and white and with the point of Braille.
– decomposition of the frame in its multiple variants leading to the unit reduction of the point.
– in parallel, analysis of the effects of transparency and opacity on different materials.
– constant, finally, the problem of fragmentation / unity.
All of these approaches converge on the point, an optical unit which is also the “Point of Aim”, the “Ball”, the “Braille Point”, the terrestrial sphere, an irreducible condensate of time and space.
From there, we can clearly see how the environment entitled La Baratte is indeed the synthesis of all Jacquet’s research, the sculpture objects (barate, watering can, waffle, donut, etc.) constituting “formal archetypes” *, color / volume / direction. Sort of cumulators of meanings, they appear as the crystallization of the artist’s plastic experiences, just as on another level, they define, in continuation of Braille books, the primary alphabet of symbolic communication.
Very elaborate, the prosaism of their form and their name should not deceive, nor should their apparent relationship with the ready-made: “The work of art does not maintain the functional relationships of the object vis-à-vis -vis his name. ”* Their obviousness is that of the final objects and any speech about them would be gossip.
“The most beautiful plastic realizations remain sphinxes with regard to language” *, reminds us of Jacquet who, after an interrogation as obstinate as lyrical of reality, reveals this apparently objective reality to us as the enigma of elsewhere , of a deeply poetic and secret nature that only he can name: Donut Flight.
Suzanne PAGE The quotes are taken from an interview with Otto Hahn – in “+ _O” – May 1977
Alain Jacquet 