Talk by Armance Léger, Friday April 4, 2:30 pm
The work of Daniel Pommereulle (1937-2003) was recently honored at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, in a permanent collection room that paid tribute to the plurality and boldness of his plastic research. The event was prompted by the museum's acquisition in 2022 of Objet de prémonition (1974), an upside-down empty paint pot set with lead and studded with spikes and scalpel blades. Emblematic of the aesthetics of violence and cruelty that the artist invented in the mid-1960s after his return from the Algerian war, this object dialogues as much with the symbolically functional objects of the Surrealists as with the assemblages of the Nouveaux Réalistes, or the hybrid objects of a post-Hiroshima artist like Tetsumi Kudo.
The diversity of the sculptures on display at the MAM in Paris bears witness to this. Just a few metres from Objet de Prémonition stood the monumental Toboggan (1974, CNAP), a 2.50-metre-high, 4-metre-long polyurethane serpentine tube whose fall ends in a large steel cleaver, designed to sever the visitor's body through the middle... Conceived by the artist for his exhibition at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Paris in 1974, the device is a provocation erected in the public space (at public expense), whose chromed beauty evokes the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi and alludes to the history of modern sculpture. At the end of the tour, two glass sculptures caught the eye, allowing visitors to pass through them from a distance. The first (La Vague, 1984, CNAP), composed of large superimposed sheets of blue industrial glass, drew a sharp crest line in space. The second (Untitled, 1993, CNAP) combined a block of yellow atomic glass, the material used to make windows for nuclear power plants, with a sheet of translucent speckled porcelain, filtering the passages of light and shadow and working with the multiple effects of translucence. Four sculptures that signify the evolution and historical importance of Daniel Pommereulle's sculptural work, like a compendium of the issues that underlie it.
Associated with the “Objecteurs” group by critic Alain Jouffroy in 1965, the year he created his very first cruel object (Objet hors saisie, 1965, Centre Georges Pompidou), Daniel Pommereulle has never ceased to keep his research in motion, often destabilizing the public who still struggle to grasp the complexity of his protean yet remarkably coherent work.
For an artist who has often changed techniques, how does the specific choice of materials enable him to concretely formulate what motivates his art? If the first sequence of Daniel Pommereulle's sculptural work is initially linked to the history of assemblage and the object, during which the use of paint pots, blades and lead between 1965 and 1975 enabled him to reach the peak of his research into the psychic potential and latent content of objects, notably through an aesthetic of the cutting edge, the radical turn he made in the mid-1980s opened up new perspectives. Through his use of industrial and atomic glass, marble, ceramics and steel between 1985 and 1995, Daniel Pommereulle forged a new, energetic sculpture that could be described as landscape-sculpture. Following in Alberto Giacometti's footsteps, he seems to have found in the medium “a solution between things that are full and calm and sharp and violent”.
Knowing the essential properties of materials, making use of their material and symbolic, aesthetic and even cathartic value, playing with their conservation qualities and their potential danger to institutions, galleries and the public, Daniel Pommereulle has created a veritable poetics of materials, which I propose to study on the occasion of this day, in order to show the contribution of his work, and his sculpture in particular, to the history of artistic creation in the second half of the 20th century.
