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About the exhibition
Spirituality and memory are at the heart of Pascal Convert's work. As part of the creation of the Centre d'Études Picasso, the museum has commissioned the artist to create a large library of crystallized books - all monographic works on Picasso - which will form the emblematic and tutelary work of the place, which will open its doors to researchers and enthusiasts at the beginning of 2025.
“La cristallisation au livre perdu” involves destroying a book and its contents with molten glass, which gradually takes the place of the book. The result is a ghostly object, a crystallized work carrying a vitrified memory. The charred remains of the original book remain at the heart of the sculpture. The choice of this work echoes the place that the library and Picasso's exceptional personal archive will occupy in the new center housed in the Hôtel de Rohan.
In anticipation of the installation of this in-situ work, the museum is presenting a major installation of wooden and crystal stumps in the courtyard, vestibule and garden of the Hôtel Salé from October onwards, entitled in the words of Apollinaire's friend to Picasso from the trenches: “Si je mourais là-bas” (“If I die over there”). Taken from the battlefields of Verdun, these Indian-ink-coated wooden stumps form a striking evocation not only of the Great War of 14/18, but also of today's wars and the destruction and migration they entail.
In a text, the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman analyzes the polysemy of this object-residue: “The stump is an object of depth, but also of extension: it still proceeds from the root, it already proceeds from the branch. [...] It evokes both life in movement, with its skeins of dynamic disturbances, and life at a standstill, with its fossilized, already mineral aspect. [...] The stump is as necessary as a growing organism as it is contingent as a lightning-stricken residue. As coherent in the soil where it grows as it is erratic and absurd on the ground where you deposit it.” (Georges Didi- Huberman, La demeure, la souche, apparentements de l'artiste, 1999). At the Hôtel Salé, these traces and imprints of the Great War will interact with the ghostly presence of the poet Apollinaire, who died in 1918, between the sculpture-monument - Figure or “sculpture of nothing” (1928) - that Picasso created in homage to his departed friend, and the numerous effigies he drew of the poet.
Biography
Sculptor Pascal Convert was born in 1957. His work is characterized by the use of a wide variety of techniques, from the most traditional (molding, imprinting, Japanese lacquer, goldsmithing...) to the most recent (computer modeling, computer-generated images, digital image animation...). This discrepancy is reflected in the choice of materials as varied as glass, wax, porcelain and projected images. It is in this tension between paradoxical processes and materials that the figurability of time is explored. 21 Press kit | Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934-1947) His work has been exhibited in France at the Capc Musée de Bordeaux (1992), the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (1995), the Centre Georges Pompidou (L'empreinte, 1997), the FRAC de Nantes (La demeure, la souche, 1999) and in several museums abroad (Wakayama Museum of Modern Art, Japan, Iwaki Museum of Modern Art, Japan, Kuntsverein de Bonn, Germany, Kouskovo Museum, Moscow, Delhi Museum of Modern Art, India...). In 2002, he inaugurated his Monument à la mémoire des résistants et otages fusillés au Mont Valérien entre 1941 et 1944 (Mémorial de la France combattante, Suresnes); in 2016, he was invited by the French Embassy in Afghanistan to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bâmiyân by the Taliban, for which he created a “photographic imprint” of the site where the monumental statues were sculpted some 1,600 years ago. In 2019, he presents Trois arbres at Galerie Éric Dupont. Working with birch bark from crematorium V at AuschwitzBirkenau, an atomized cherry tree from Hiroshima and stone trees of life from Armenian “khatchkars”, Pascal Convert uses family, cultural and historical archaeology to imagine what survives human destruction and violence.
