Bruyckere in Berlin. Piller. Ekphrasis
MO. CO., in Montpellier
From our special correspondent
On tiptoe, as if levitating between earth and sky, six archangels burst into the MO. CO. from Montpelier. Sculpted in wax veined with pink and blue, their heads and upper bodies hidden under a threadbare fur coat, they bow in a gesture of contemplation or compassion. “During the confinement, I was struck by all these anonymous people who, in hospitals, in the street, took care of others, of some who were going to die. I saw figures of archangels there, similar to those painted by Giorgione in the Renaissance,” confides the sculptor Berlinde de Bruyckere.
For his first exhibition in a French public institution, the Flemish artist displayed more than fifty sculptures and watercolor drawings on the vast stages of the MO. CO. and on three levels. The journey begins from above, from the sky, with these unique archangels. Then we descend, as if caught up in the gravity of our earthly condition, among suffering figures: two stuffed horses, piled up one on top of the other, reminiscent of carrion from the First World War, then San Sebastiana trunk molded from an old elm, gnawed and debarked by animals, which the artist has pierced with pieces of wood then bandaged with scraps of fabric.
In the last room, at the very bottom, plunged into semi-darkness, equine skins hang from butcher’s hooks or lie in a heap on pallets. “It reminds me of visiting Auschwitz,” murmurs a visitor, startled. Have we arrived in hell? This is only one side of the exhibition, which conceals much more tender and even sensual impulses. From the first room, the molding of a large crippled tree (After Cripplewood II), erected on iron props, thus evokes both a strange equestrian monument and a phallic form. Right next to it, draft horse collars, adorned with pink wax lips and blood-red fabrics, suggest large wounds as well as vulvas. A little further on, a fetal form covered in horse skin (Portrait), suspended in a window by a leather strap, refers to the gestation of a body connected by an umbilical cord. While one floor below, in another window, two naked dead animals, pressed against each other, tell of an embrace…
Sexuality and birth would therefore rub shoulders here with suffering and death in a compendium of the universal human experience? Berlinde de Bruyckere’s empathy is broader. Shocked in her childhood by the animal remains stored in her father’s butcher’s shop, but also by the brutal pruning of the trees, her work embraces in the same compassionate impulse the whole of life, both animal and plant.
Hence its ambiguous forms, always in metamorphosis, which weave links between these different kingdoms. Hence her predilection, too, for organic materials imbued with softness: wax, discarded cow or equine skins that she salvages, woolen blankets, silks or cotton fabrics. The temptation to touch his works is such that the MO. CO. has planned a manipulable material library, to satisfy the curiosity of visitors at the end.
Borrowings from religious art, which dot the entire route, reinforce this sanctification of all forms of life. Under the title Pieta, drawings celebrate the gestures of solicitude of relatives or caregivers towards the sick, the dying. The remains of a tied up foal, To Zurbaran, is reminiscent of the sacrificial lamb painted by the Spanish artist and, beyond that, all the injured, abused innocent beings.
Presented in huge wooden frames like old altarpieces, compositions mixing bones (in reality branches molded in ash-grey wax), shreds of tapestry, fabrics and newspapers discreetly make monumental forms of lilies or faded peonies. Like an ultimate burst of beauty, captured at the heart of our common finitude.
