"Yes... Sculpture" - Louise Manson

Art?... Art! Sculpture?... Sculpture! Two questions and two

exclamatory and emphatic statements. Both having a resplendent

and fortuitous confirmation in Louise Manzon’s artistic practice. If

technology has given rise to a production and consumption of

images marked by automation—and thus, by indifference—art,

through the recovery of manual adeptness, has restored the values

of discontinuity and difference. Technology advances a visual world

that is two-dimensional. Sculpture re-establishes resonance and

gives duration to the images.

Whether fired clay ceramic or terracotta, the use of the material, in

its viscous sedimentary quality, responds to Manzon’s need to bring

back to art the ancient dream of images that continue and endure,

and which, in terms of expectations, means reasserting the hope of

possible immortality.

So, this could well be the reaffirmed value for making art today, a nomadic

and eclectic approach that draws from art history and from myth,

recasting it in the present and remodelling it in the unhurried material of

sculpture. Duration set against obsolescence, matter in opposition to

surface, all within a frame constructed to go beyond boundaries.

In this instance, reinstituting sculpture means to re-establish the inten-

sity of art, the possibility to charge the image with the power of seduc-

tion, capable of transmitting messages that even involve ecology.

Manzon’s sculpture enfolds itself in the narrative iconography of

myths, of both human and animalistic nature. Sculpture is what causes

the artist’s phantasms to become real, transmuting the illusions into a

concrete vision of works of art asking to be let into the world.

The sculptural language, however, is not utilized as an antiquarian

means to fetishistically bring back the art of times past, but as a tool

capable of giving substance to images that exist on three levels: below

the earth, on the earth, in the air. Images that develop in both ascending

and descending movement, each time corresponding with the motiva-

tions underlying the inspiration and the resulting composition.

The level below the earth is expressed through fish images that

evoke water, moisture and plants. The undersea fauna, formed using

terracotta, seem to gulp for air in a search for a survival that is

clearly threatened by man. The level of the earth is conjured up

through the presence and configuration of a feminine essence that

seemingly lives on the surface of the earth, arranged through

complexly posed characters. This female figure is Tethys, with the

self-evident narcissism of a body depicted with extreme resonance.

The third level, the air, is alluded to by a sort of fan adorning the

mythical sea goddess’ head. A baroque structure supports the

sculptural framework, the volumes of the body and the garments

articulated within the enveloping shape. The curved line hints at an

upward movement, climbing towards aerial settings and wondrous

vertical ascents that liberate Tethys from the laws of gravity.

Done