Galerie Claude Lemand

CLAUDE MOLLARD. Faces before Gods, the Origenes.

By Christine Buci-Glucksmann (extraits).

The paradox of Claude Mollard’s pic­tures lies in the fact that the birth of a face can be seen as the basis of the min­eral or veg­etal cosmos and reaches the limits of human beings. The pic­tures are taken from up close to the object, as face to face which refers to the first por­traits of humanity like Sumerian or Egyptian art. A face does not define itself only by its nat­ural expres­sive­ness. It can deform, twist or mul­tiply itself. It can rep­re­sent inex­pres­sive­ness, horror or many other looks. At the end, it is only a kind of “ab­stract machine”, rep­re­sented by two holes for the eyes and the fea­tures of the face, which are the nose and the mouth. It can be deformed until it becomes a non-face. As Artaud said in 1947, “The Human head has not found its face.”
(...)
This pop­u­la­tion of Origenes demon­strates the wild state of art. It emerges from a pri­mor­dial “chaos­mose”, in a true onto­log­ical pet­ri­fi­ca­tion, which forces us to think back the ori­gins of the living and the birth of art. It travels in time, from astral time immemo­rial to the short-lives of flower-faces, which scramble the bor­ders of the organic and inor­ganic, with an oppo­site looks to “na­ture’s por­traits” but yet fre­quently men­tioning the por­traits of art.

Translated from French by Marianne Coadou.

www.claude-lemand.com