Alain Bosquet: “Ipoustéguy the Great: Rupture, Cracks, Fissures”

Whatever the scrap-metal welders, plaster silhouette molders, fabric weavers, pyromaniacs of matter, garbage scavengers, machinists operating mechanical contraptions that sigh, spit or moan, engineers of real and fake semaphores, beam collectors and ragpickers may think, there has been only one great sculptor in France for the past quarter century: Jean Ipoustéguy.

Of course, he is not unknown and his reputation is well-founded, but there are still too many gullible souls scattered among the worshippers of the object to allow him to finally reach the rank that is rightfully his. Elsewhere, in the most prestigious museums, whether in the United States, Denmark, Germany or Switzerland, he is fittingly celebrated: at home, there is a tendency to relegate him with some awkwardness among the classics […] The viewer needs a degree of inwardness, a degree of reflection, a degree of philosophy, to measure up to these small and large-format works, which call into question — as sculpture has perhaps never done since Boccioni and Moore — the nature of man fixed in marble or bronze, with the thousand questions that this entails.

A first period — if one wishes to simplify — allowed Ipoustéguy’s blue masses to assert that between abstraction and figuration the boundaries are manifold: the biological element and the geometric element know how to conspire, lending the masses a very powerful emotional tone. Tragic sculpture, without the theatrical attitudes of tragedy or the distortion of any face whatsoever — that was revolutionary, from the late 1950s onward.
Later, in Carrara marble of singular purity, Ipoustéguy carved recumbent bodies, beings either dead or simply in a state of constant metamorphosis. It was the notion of necessary rupture that came fully into its own: the human body is not of one piece, but implies severed parts and the separation of the organs or limbs that compose it. The result, on a plastic level, is a striking impression of mobility. Here again the gift of life and the presence of death complement each other. One must go back to the sixteenth century to find such intensity and such metaphysical warning.
More recently, a period in Ipoustéguy’s work emerged that might be described as elegiac: in painting, one would call it a leaning toward still lifes — fruit in particular — which appear to be traversed by flat surfaces, or on the verge of bursting. This familiar vein did not distract him from his main activity, which is to treat the body through its multiple mirrors. This is how the works in his current exhibitions should be understood. In his portraits, Ipoustéguy takes an expressive head, which he lays flat or tilts, for instance. While certain features are almost realistic, he propels the skull outward through openwork bands, the better to capture a movement that concludes in a network of lines and abstract surfaces. But this alone cannot sustain the intensity of the subject: he gives the same head a kind of double that can be read as a two-dimensional profile. We are thus confronted with two interpretations of the skull, one full of dynamic protrusions and the other, welded to it, almost inert. The result is a feeling of duality within the same person, endowed as it were with two mentalities. Women, rather than being confined to a single anatomy, find themselves enveloped in wide sheets, or rolls, or fabrics, from which they emerge while still remaining part of them.
To emphasize one element or another, Ipoustéguy can, here and there, play with voids, holes, blanks one might say. Humor and virtuosity conspire so that a figure may possess three or even four profiles: one is bumpy, the second is suspended in empty space, the third is solid but as if deliberately reduced to a bare outline, the fourth is in negative. The lesson of Gargallo is pushed to the extreme, and that of Moore acquires a strange velocity.

Each figure is at once present and absent, solid and disintegrated, real and dreaming, tangible and evanescent. The sculpture seems to coil around itself. None escapes a highly skillful economy of breaks, cracks and fissures. Likeness no longer exists: it must be double or triple, denied yet endlessly resurrected. A bronze art that invites reflection on the nature of Man and on his different identities — that is something new and fertile.

Jean Ipoustéguy, beyond his sovereign and Promethean art, gives us the desire to ask ourselves again: who are we? Even bronze, in his hands, has the right to profound introspection.