My broken face
Work : My broken face
Localisation : Le Lieu Multiple gallery, Montpellier. Agust 2024
Reference text :
My broken face.
The so-called Yellow Vest Movement gave rise to a wave of violence. Among the demonstrators alone, 238 people were reported seriously injured in the head, including 23 blinded.
No French person of my generation had ever witnessed a social struggle of such intensity that sometimes made some fear the start of a civil war.
Fortunately, the situation calmed down. But for the victims on all sides who would be left with after-effects and whose lives were shattered like glass in a matter of seconds, the war had indeed taken place.
Gradually discovering on social networks the terrible images of mutilations by LBD, I thought back to the broken faces of 1914-1918, then to Anna Coleman Ladd and Jane Poupelet.
In the post-war period, these two sculptors put their talent at the service of the mutilated by creating custom-made facial prostheses with striking realism. To the disfigurement, the invisibility of the former poilus, to the dismay and disgust aroused by those who recalled in spite of themselves the atrocities of the great slaughter, they tried to give back an identity, a social passport. By making them reborn thanks to these masks which reproduced their former appearance almost perfectly, by giving them back a dignity, they affirmed above all that art – because that’s what it was – could serve to give the world a human face. Art was what allowed us to glue the pieces back together, to at least prevent them from scattering under the centrifugal pressure of deadly forces.
Because we are constantly caught up in the whirlwind of these cycles of construction-destruction. We even play on it in all these little rituals aimed at swallowing in bits the enormity of our destinies over which we have so little control.
In the Jewish tradition for example, glasses are broken at weddings. In Greece, plates are broken. Everywhere, always, we have done the same. Some see it as a symbol of renewal, others on the contrary the intention to affirm an irreversibility.
These contradictions are perfectly summed up in Japan in a method of ceramic repair dating back to the 15th century, Kintsugi. This consists of not throwing away a broken object, nor hiding its re-gluing and gaps – which would amount to wiping the slate clean of the past – but to highlight them by covering them with gold powder so as not to forget its eventful history.
To return to these terrible moments of 2018 and 2019 which had deeply shocked me, in order not to forget them, I had first thought of going to meet all these newly mutilated people, to collect their testimony. I had the confused intention of getting something tangible out of it. Why not a cast of their face in order to show the way in which the social struggle had wounded their bodies? But, if they did accept, I felt incapable of approaching people who had experienced such trauma with tact and respect. The approach quickly seemed voyeuristic and clumsy to me.
The only face I had to hand to mold was my own… I was not a yellow vest strictly speaking, and I had even less had the sinister misfortune of losing an eye. But, noting the hardening of the doctrine of maintaining order during the demonstrations I had attended at that time, I was well aware that today, for anyone, a stray LBD bullet was never far away…
The more complications accumulated in my life, the more I realized that we, the little artists, were also part – metaphorically of course – of the millions of broken faces of this economic system, of this megamachine that Fabian Scheidler admirably describes.
So I made a mold of myself. A self-portrait in which my face was as broken as my self-esteem after many disappointments, failures and half-successes. Destroyed a hundred times, rebuilt a hundred times or rather patched up with the means at hand, as best I could. Here too, I gathered the shards, I added gold dust like magic powder. But if the result resembled an object subjected to Kintsugi, the tension was not appeased, the cracks were still working under the ceramic. The shiny metal symbolized the two opposing forces that were at work in me. Gold, that is to say material comfort, undoubtedly allowed artists to move forward, to continue their creation in relative serenity. But its absence, when precariousness, the anxiety of tomorrow reared its head, was for many the sign of its drying up. Holding and making things hold together, making ends meet, not living for money, but having enough to keep moving forward, ultimately, that was also what being an artist was all about.
And I did Art for myself, of course. But also, as much as possible, to leave my followers a world that had to remain whole.