Galerie Enrico Navarra

I Remember... Jean-Louis PratI remember discovering Charles Simonds' workin New York, surprised and filled with wonder by thisuniverse seemingly born on the banks of a drownedcivilization, unlike what had been offered by contemporaryart up until that point. I remember the clay, a fragileand sensual material, which aroused memories, games,modeling, the charm and silence of other spaces buriedin memory. I remember gaining an intense feeling ofpossession from this new, sculpted work, the perfecttoy that every child would like to make, while knowingthat this inventive world could only be offered up byan adult.I remember this new space, this incongruous and emblematicsculpture, which poses questions and providesmany responses at the same time. Yet, as MauriceBlanchot has written, the "response is the question'smisfortune. " In this case, mystery is tamed by the mythic,strange, and happy universe, and draws its strengthin a cruel and difficult world of this majestic city, at oncebeautiful and intolerable, living and brutal, solidlyimplanted in Manhattan's granite, where cementunites with bronze. In this city, where there is no placeleft free for the earth and its care, only the buildingof a bronze world might respond to life's challenge,its fragile conscience. But the symbols, souvenirs, andbeings, bear witness to a more docile world, and theinfinitely small attests to the finally tamed dream thatcan at last poetically confront reality's enormity withoutfear. Without the least bit of conflict these two worldscohabit and complement each other. The mind tacklesthe excavation sites and reveals what must absolutelynot be forgotten. The creator gives it space and form,the new and antique materials find themselves, by theforce of memory, in the act of sculpture. In this labyrinthinework, whose distinctive mise en scene reconstructsthe buried and visible topography of fortressesin the course of being built or in perdition, man seemsabsent, but in no case has his soul disappeared; itseems he has only left this building site for a shorttime, in order to tend to another, more prolific one. It isnot long before those who created these silent spacessurge up from the shadows, they emerge from theirroots, but they always form one body with the earthfrom which they arise. Henceforth, this providentialand fecund earth reproduces the life of these depopulatedruins, giving birth, through memory, to spirit,to its suggestive representation.I still remember the unreal presence of the inaccessiblesculpture Charles Simonds made for the WhitneyMuseum, tucked for eternity in the corner of an ample,cubic, stairway, in Marcel Brauer's symbol of Americanculture. The feeling of calmness, where the infinitelysmall inserts itself into the infinitely large, where memoriesto decipher surge up in the malleable worldconceived for an apparently immutable world.At the threshold of a new dawn, Charles Simonds,brings us toward a long sought after world, bringsus to reconsider time, to give it, by re-decomposingit, a new tension and substance, a newly definable,but always fugitive reality. It invades, through anotherdimension and through another representation, a strongand differentiated sculpture. J.-L. P.23