Bertrand Tillier, “Ipousteguy, the laws of scvlptvre”

Ipoustéguy, the laws of scvlptvre

In one of the texts Francis Ponge devoted to the work of Germaine Richier, entitled ‘SCVLPTVRE’, Francis Ponge noted the unpronounceability of ‘this word of lightning created in memory of the first fulguration’, whose very spelling places it on the side of those words which, invented for eternity, ‘found themselves at once engraved on the stone tablets of the law’. It is in this hesitation between the fracturing of forms and the engraving of a tabular surface that Ipoustéguy’s sculptural work has unfolded, partly but largely. In his early works – Jeanne d’Arc (1957) and Casque fendu (1958) – the smooth, light-catching forms resemble a helmet from another, undefined time, or a timeless head, whose mass has been cracked, revealing the cracked thickness of the thick, crusty material, to suggest the existence of another presence contained in another space that the cracking operation would begin to reveal. Referring to his sculptures from this period, Ipoustéguy never ceased to recall the meaning and significance of an act by which he claimed to have ‘broken Brancusi’s egg’ – a work entitled Le commencement du monde (1920), of perfect matrix form. In a clear break with abstraction, which he dismissed with the geometric, architectural structure of Cénotaphe (1957) – ‘the ultimate burial without a body’, as Pierre Gaudibert put it – Ipoustéguy set out to crack and excavate matter, to force its organic unity and extract new images designed to alter perception and complicate the meaning of what we thought we had seen at first sight. ‘I stop the images I see’, he told Evelyne Artaud in 1992.

The figurative ambition of the self-styled ‘imagier’, through which he aspired to resurrect man in his physical, social and contemporary environment, in his history and myths, and even in the labyrinth of his psyche, from the end of the 1950s until the beginning of the 21st century, his work was expressed in a formal language that always refused to make a choice between a sometimes unbearable realism sharpened by the expressiveness of the forms, a dreamlike quality tinged with surrealism, and a symbolism haunted by an intimate introspection split between the tragic and the erotic. The cracks, gashes and tears that make up the syntax of Ipoustéguy’s sculpture will never leave his work: they run across the skin of the female figure in La Terre (1963) and its alter ego L’Homme (1963), in place of their spines and joints. They fracture the simultaneously fragmented and armoured anatomy of Ecbatane (1965-1966). They scar the back of L’Homme passant la porte (1966), just as they shape, by subtraction, the battered and amputated bodies of the Val-de-Grâce group (1975). The scvlptvre according to Ipoustéguy is there, in this writing of the wound that will find new occurrences in his imposing marbles produced with flexion in the 1960s and 1970s (La Mort du pape, 1967; Agonie de la mère, 1971-1972; or La Mort de l’évêque Neumann, 1976). They all vacillate between the sculpted group or environment and the installation, in a distribution of space that becomes the stage for a confrontation between the spectators and the works.

However, Ipoustéguy’s sculpture cannot be reduced to this concept of the visible dissected, as proclaimed like an unbearable cry by the monumentality of a Ligier-Richier-style flayed figure struck by a telephone: Scène de la vie moderne (1976). In the ‘Tactiles’ and ‘Situations visuelles’ series, modelages and assemblages that he conceived in the early 1960s as little ‘theatres of the hand’, in a vein that was not devoid of eroticism or strangeness, the artist was less concerned with blindness as a limit than with touch as a way of accessing the world: the spectator would plunge his hand into cubes or parallelepipeds covered with a curtain, which are like inhabited or occupied crevices, penetrating them through tears, breaches or slits, to discover unknown forms, textures and objects. Basically, Ipoustéguy was inviting us to experience sculpture, its volumes and surfaces, blindly, by touch, deliberately reversing the terms of a cultural relationship to art that is based on the gaze. What he revealed through his language of incisions, cuts and cracks is a configuration in which what is revealed in the hollows of exploded matter and half-open anatomies should be prehensible, but stubbornly remains inaccessible, except to the eye, which must convert the experience according to which seeing is touching.

So much for what we might call Ipoustéguy’s lesson in sculpture. But what of the tables, which Ponge reminded us have immemorially borne the law of scvlptvre, which itself belongs to the mists of time? In this case, the sculptor’s dynamic works as a contrario. In symmetry to the works in which he offers something to see, rather than to touch, the artist has multiplied the number of pieces conceived with the help of trays and surfaces where the visible is displayed in the open air, arranged in all its brilliance, accessible as if on a stall. The Monument à Charles Delescluze (1964-1965) consists of a platform on which the historical drama unfolds, the protagonists of which are small figurines similar to the lead or plastic soldiers played with by little boys in the twentieth century: this is where the Communard Delescluze died, rifle in hand, on a Parisian barricade, in the middle of the ruins. This scene is supported by a kind of shrine column made of skeletal fragments containing a catacomb-like pile of skulls, a reminder that Delescluze’s body was thrown into a mass grave to prevent his burial becoming a place of pilgrimage or political rallying. In a project (abandoned) for a funerary stele in memory of Pierre Overney, the word ‘plateau’ recurs: it crosses the body of the Maoist militant who was murdered by a security guard at the entrance to the Renault factories, at the height of his shoulders, on which he carries the body of an immigrant worker. This tray, on the edge of which can be read this elliptical epitaph, ‘Overney, espèce de solidaire. For the wolf, the pigeon, the tiger, the whale’, is intended as a theatre of fraternity between all the persecuted. The work was rejected by Overney’s friends and family, who found it incomprehensible, ‘as if a locomotive were sitting in a kitchen’, said Ipoustéguy without bitterness, who turned it into a kind of allegory, fist outstretched and sex erect to signify the struggle, the resistance and the life that goes on beyond death (La Mort du frère, 1972). But it is above all in the ceramic ensemble Mangeur de gardiens (1970) that the table finds its most accomplished expression: piles of crockery and utensils, grinning heads, anatomical fragments and various bones are displayed on either side of a bust partially wrapped in bandages, its open mouth revealing carnivorous teeth, forming a shapeless and disquieting whole, half banquet, half charnier, the display of which fully reveals contemporary society subjected to the diktat of guardians of all kinds. The table of law is not the table of law we think it is; it governs society, through repression, violence and death, to which Ipoustéguy contrasts scvlptvre and its own laws, as an art ‘where the word is unbreakable’.

Summer 2025
Bertrand Tillier
Professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne