Walter Lewino: “The Work of Ipoustéguy”

The man is stocky. The first thing that strikes you is the size and shape of his biceps, and his flat stomach. His hands are short, with short nails. They knead clay studded with lumps, extracting thick pancakes and stretching them into endless coils. The strands and pancakes assemble, clinging to the side of a man-sized construction made of pink cement blocks, roughly embedded and open on all sides. Cavities appear. The center is hollow. Objects, toys, old medals—sometimes embedded, sometimes molded into the cement—modulate (the word is fashionable) the passageways and exteriors. It is autumn 1964, in Choisy-le-Roi; Ipoustéguy is working on his Discours sous Mistra.

His first truly accomplished and career-spanning sculpture, La Rose (The Rose), dates from 1954. It is the foundation stone of a complex body of work—a body of work with multiple, intertwined aspirations which, conceived on several levels both in time and in intent, diversifies tirelessly. But it is a constant, stubborn work that advances unwaveringly towards an absolute that, fortunately, is always challenged by the artist himself. He explains:
“Picasso stalks the world, arranging it (or disturbing it) according to a process that is above all visual. That’s why there’s no discernible thread running through his work; this primacy of sight leaves him at the mercy of his encounters and appearances. He told Brassaï: ‘It seems strange to me that people have come to make marble statues… I understand that you can see something in a tree root, a wall crack, a corroded stone, a pebble… but marble? It stands out like a block, offering no image. How could Michelangelo see his David in a block of marble? Why didn’t it occur to Picasso that Michelangelo himself was his David, trapped in the block of marble from which he had to free himself? At the opposite end of the spectrum from Picasso, I see Giacometti. Of him, I’d say he is a “core reducer,” as he strives for an ever stronger and more essential concentration of his purpose.

“Me, starting from a formal obsession (I think it is the egg, or the uterus, or the fist), I develop it and I’d like it to clump together, to annex the surrounding world—people and things and landscape—from one to the next. This can give rise to my tactile works as well as Discours sous Mistra or Alexandre devant Ecbatane (which are attempts at landscape sculpture). For me, the plastic form is simply the result of my intimate ‘motives for being.’ Usually, the first idea, the source idea of the work in my hands, goes back several years. So now, among other things, I’m thinking mainly about an important piece I’m going to make later. Not my next sculpture. The one after, maybe. I’ve had it in mind for a while. I’ve done a lot of drawings.
It is going to be a couple. The man, the woman, and then the city behind them. For the moment, I can see where it’s going to go, between the man and the woman. I can’t see the city so well; I don’t know yet how it’s going to fit in. Maybe it will be encompassed, digesting the couple. Maybe it will be further away, behind or on top… I still have to think about it and draw. All this can still change a lot, but when I go to execution, it will all be there, in my head. It may move a little along the way, but not much more, only in detail… It’s a question of… I don’t know… I always start with an idea. At first, I hang on to big ropes, then it works in depth, gradually becoming more nuanced. One day, it is ripe. I set to work…”

In the case of Le Discours sous Mistra, one wonders whether the source idea dates back to 1944. In 1944, Ipoustéguy was working as a laborer at the Bordeaux submarine base. During a bombing raid, for the first time, he was able to enter the base itself. It was a revelation, or rather a tender confirmation. There, in front of him, above, below, and behind, was a gigantic, teeming, complex, closed world: the monstrosity of submarines in dry dock, the swarming of workers, the indefinite clamor of noises, of pounding echoing. No doubt about it: this is the great work, the core of the Pyramid, the inner fortress. Amazed, he rediscovered the very setting of his confused aspirations, his childhood dreams, his intrauterine dreams.

Twenty years later, when he recounted the scene in front of his Discours sous Mistra, now nearing completion, I could see how the central mass of the Discours, in its cavities at least, was directly inspired by the Bordeaux submarine base. This explains the presence of the submersible and perhaps that of the curious fusilier-marin (marine rifleman) lurking between two loopholes. “You see,” says Ipoustéguy, speaking of Bordeaux and pointing to a hollow in the Discours, “I opened there, above the submarine. And then we worked there, higher up…” It is true that a little later, evoking another cavity in the Discours, he would refer to it as the horse gate. “Yes, it was the porch of Dun-Haut, my native village in Lorraine. I still have an old watercolor of it…” Ipoustéguy likes to punctuate his sculptures with intimate references and real-life stories, often disparate and unrelated to the work in hand.

At the end of the 1964 Venice Biennale, where he won the David E. Bright Prize, Ipoustéguy set to work on his Discours sous Mistra. During numerous visits to Choisy, I followed the work practically stone by stone—the expression being valid insofar as the Discours is built not of stones, but of juxtaposed cement blocks.

One question springs to mind: why “The Discourse” and why “under Mistra” (or Mystras)? The set is made up of two main pieces: the man, who is life-size (as is often the case with Ipoustéguy), and the discourse itself—a sort of vaguely pyramidal architecture, pierced by a thousand cavities, shorter than the man, 1.50 meters long by 1.20 meters wide. Between the two, and to the right of the speech, are junction plates on the ground: the sea. The man speaks. His words, at first, are materialized by cement shapes that run along his (single) arm, stretched out towards the speech, a little like the balloons and fumetti beloved of comic strips. Hinged on large, invisible springs, they hiccup and twitch at the slightest impact. Man speaks; there is no denying it.

As for Mistra, it is a half-Feudal, half-Byzantine hilltop town, built in the 13th century not far from ancient Sparta. Ipoustéguy discovered it a few years ago during a trip to Greece: “There, on the plain, is Sparta. Between Sparta and the mountains, on a spur, on a ridge, there is Mistra. It was built by the Crusaders on their return from the Holy Land. It is fortified and at the same time crammed with churches and chapels, all intertwined because they were built on different levels. I’ve always loved chivalry. I used to marvel at its vestiges.”

So, for Ipoustéguy, the “Discourse” is both Mistra and the speech the speaker has just delivered. He would like the shapes, the blocks, the hollows to link up, to string together like the words of a single sentence. With capital letters, verbs, complements, punctuation… And then, too, incidents, metaphors, images. He is convinced that there is a profound analogy between an artist’s preferred forms—his vocabulary—and vocabulary itself. For years, he had amassed a stock of forms and words. Four years earlier, for example, his formal research (Le Heaume, Vauban, Les Villes, etc.) had produced Plage et Falaise (Beach and Cliff). But process still prevailed over intention. The “form-words” were too rigid and did not assimilate well. Vocabulary had not fully submitted to the theme. With Le Discours, it became freer, and therefore richer. Vocabulary exercises lead to a complete language.

Ipoustéguy claims that the problems of abstraction were foreign to him. Granted, but La Rose, Cénotaphe, Les Villes, many of his drawings, and his respect for the Brancusian egg suggest otherwise. Born into sculpture at a time when abstraction was coming of age, it was only logical that, like some of his contemporaries, he should follow the opposite route, starting with La Rose and ending ten years later with the naturalism of L’Homme.

By 1964, his purely formal concerns had finally subsided, and Discours would be the first work in which the author’s subterranean will and obsessions could blossom outside all historical and scholastic contingencies. Alexandre will confirm this evolution. It will not be without a return to the prodigious Baroque that is Ipoustéguy’s deepest nature, nor without problems of space definitively taking precedence over problems of volume—even though a third obsession has long been weighing heavily on his work: breaking the spectator-object relationship that has always remained that of the amateur and the work, a source of immobility.

Some artists—and one naturally thinks of the “kineticists” (Takis, Bury, Tinguely, Schöffer, etc.)—strive to do this by creating works in motion. Ipoustéguy chooses a different route: involving the viewer in the very space of the sculpture, so that its points of approach, and therefore its profound relationships, never freeze. This was already perceptible in Rémoulus, in which the human figure returned to his echo, dominated by the work. This is the first stammering of an attempt to break down scales, which Discours will take up and echo with relish. It is worth noting that there is no desire to destroy, but on the contrary a desire to confuse, extended with the complicity, conscious or otherwise, of the viewer. The photographer Colos knows all about this, as he was forced to shoot Le Discours from a wide variety of angles and distances without ever achieving a single overall view.

The “sculpture-object” is outdated. Le Discours remains an object only insofar as, for the use of society, it carries within it its counter-objects and the counter-objects of its objects. One of the photos below is revealing in this respect. It was taken from behind, through one of the loopholes that open onto the central cavities. In the foreground, seen from behind, is the “Draguignan marine rifleman”—a small mantelpiece figurine purchased during a trip to Provence, hence its name. In the background, blurred by distance, are two small soldiers, also added pieces but infinitely smaller in size. Finally, in the furthest background, present but not discernible in the photo (which reveals only a blurred triangle), is part of the outer man. The photographer had to get as close as possible, inserting his lens between two cement cliffs, just as the author hopes to compel the viewer to do.

It is this desire to invite penetration, an inner adventure, that underlies the “Tactile” series. As Ipoustéguy himself wrote: “The sculptor is the one who has the gift of apprehending his work from several points in space at once, and his professional probity obliges him to locate around it as many observation points as possible; I add to this an additional position situated at the very heart of the sculpture. This is the sculptor: he moves around his obsession; he penetrates it and, if he has conviction, you go with him.”

In Le Discours, the intended confusion is not just dimensional. The sailor, the soldiers, and the man are of different times and styles, as are the submersible and its detachment of stylized sailors, the Hellenizing frieze at the stern, the archaizing figures at the top, and the gushing crawler: “The world will never be made only of contemporaries.” Le Discours sous Mistra is neither demonstration nor poem; it is a sum, a kind of symphonic, contradictory debate. He asks questions, but doesn’t always answer them; he tells stories; he grafts incident upon incident; he lingers for the pleasure of a bon mot or an image; he opens parentheses, omits to close them; he moves from prose to verse, from lyricism to mathematical demonstration… It is Raymond Roussel in stone.

A year later, Alexandre devant Ecbatane, commissioned by CIFOM to demonstrate the sculptural possibilities of cast iron, would digest this confusion. The original was made in expanded polystyrene—an ultra-light industrial material—while the cast-iron copy weighed in at almost two and a half tons. The result is Alexandre devant Ecbatane, arguably the first lost-foam casting of polystyrene in the history of art.

The younger brother of the Discours, it is a work of rest. Despite his triple profile and three articulated arms, the Man-Alexander has regained a more formal serenity. The City of Ecbatane has fallen asleep, closed in on itself, revealing little of its entrails. The sculpture undeniably gains in restrained power. Alexandre is a subdued Discours. Aware of its power, it no longer demonstrates, but asserts.

La Femme au bain (Woman in the Bath), completed in 1966, again rejects this serenity. There is no doubt that it is one of those works of research, of fixation, where aesthetic concerns fade, but which prepare those long stages of production when, calmed and enriched, the sculptor-artist asserts his rights. For, unlike Brancusi or Giacometti, Ipoustéguy’s work proceeds in sudden bursts of speed. We already know that La Femme au bain will be a key work. Never has the haunting of the inner space, the core, been so tyrannical, however nuanced and subtle it may be. The wide-open mouth, the cutout in the thigh (is this a substitute for sex?), and the articulated flaps invite penetration. The show is inside; form gives way to content.

With La Femme au bain, Ipoustéguy has attempted for the first time to integrate his tactile senses into a sculpture. The hand, as much as the eye, is an instrument of understanding and enjoyment, and it would be wrong to see the tactile as provocative, when in fact it is nothing more than a stimulus to active knowledge, play, and exchange. For while Ipoustéguy’s work always has a playful side, it is neither an inside joke nor a parody. Closer to Kriegsspiel (wargaming) than to humor, it tends to fascinate rather than entertain.

It is not a one-way game where the artist proposes and the viewer submits, but an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to find common ground between the two. With Marx, Freud, and the Enlightenment, with Hiroshima and Sarcelles, with Sputnik, the Five Nations tournament, and car graveyards, the ivory towers have cracked. A handful of artists have understood this and assumed it. They are the engaged artists of our time, engaged by our time. They have come down from their nirvana and are walking through life. They are a motley crew, tumultuous and sensual.

A troupe whose dreams are nourished by cosmic travel, gadgets, panoramic wars, and erotic consciousness. They move forward, heads held high, arms open, towards a new humanism. We will soon realize that they made the years 1950–1965 one of art’s great moments. Ipoustéguy walks in the front row.