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Frédérique Nalbandian in the "Jardin
des Cordeliers".
An artist in the garden of Epicurus
By Jacques Leenhardt
In Paradise too there are four gardens, defined by the rivers
that flow across it. In Digne, the "Jardin des Cordeliers" is
also divided into four areas, bearing the names of our senses :
smell, which operates in the aromatic garden ; taste, which is
flattered by vegetables from the market garden once they have passed
through the kitchen ; the medicinal garden at the entrance, serving
as wisdom for the body ; and the sensorial garden, extending an
invitation to touch and hearing.
Many years after the Persian poets who imagined Paradise had disappeared,
around the year 306 B.C. in Attic Greece, Epicurus settled in Athens
and acquired a garden there. In this place for meditation and sharing,
he dispensed his teaching for the rest of his life. Just as there
had been Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, there was thus
also the Garden of Epicurus. The rest of the tale recalls the great
names of Lucretius and Gassendi, who passed on to us this philosophy
which starts with things that comprise our world and the sensations
they arouse within us. And even a joyous disbelief in anything
that does not reach us through the enchanted channels of our senses.
When installing her work in Les Cordeliers, Frédérique
Nalbandian inevitably rediscovered this wise philosophy amidst
the garden's trees and herbs. And if the teaching of Epicurus is
indeed the pursuit of happiness and the ways of securing it, Frédérique
Nalbandian is perhaps a happy artist. Not entirely carefree, however,
as her work, however beautiful in its form, and however pleasant
our tour of her garden, does not fail to sollicit our attention
and reflection.
A certain attentiveness, first of all, an open-mindedness towards
anything that touches us, for everything begins with our dependency
on sensations, as advocated by the great tradition of empiricism.
Attentiveness to the materials which comprise these works, to soap,
so paradoxical in its infinite variations. Touch and smell are
called upon, just as much as seeing and hearing. In Frédérique
Nalbandian's work, one rediscovers a focus on matter which was
introduced into painting by Dubuffet. A fascination with matter
which is constantly evident in this body of work addressing itself,
might one dare say, to the eye's sense of touch.
But art would not be what we have wanted it to become in the modern
era, a master of joy and thought, if it didn't also accompany us
as we meditate on its forms of expression and their uncertainties.
Criticism has long been made of errors induced by our senses. Yet,
quickly recuperated by contemporary physics, poets have taught
us, as Aragon said, that errors of the senses lead to strange flowerings
of reason. And it is thus together, in a movement that makes no
attempt to distinguish between them, that they constitute what
we call our world. Let ourselves be carried away, in sheer enjoyment,
on the wings of these fruitful and dreamlike wanderings.
That's how far my meditations had taken me when I entered the garden.
What a surprise to meet, perched on an antique column, a brain.
Grey matter, oversized, as clear as triumphant reason, carved to
show in detail its lobes and convolutions. Homage to Gassendi,
one says to oneself, but also, one suspects, a nod-and-a-wink to
the medicinal and psychotropic plants that surround it in this
enclosed space. The master of all forms of reasoning and as many
vagabond errors, this brain is as ephemeral as the truths it pretends
to let us glimpse. The soap of which it is made will suffer the
same erosion as the mountains, its decrees will drift like the
continents. Frédérique Nalbandian is amused by our
misapprehension and we soon realise that the imposing fluted column
on which our cerebral organ is enthroned in fact denounces itself
for what it is : the trivial moulding of an ordinary trash can.
Art is usually presented in the long-lasting guise of its material.
Marble or bronze are its legitimate purveyors. Here, it's quite
the contrary : form comes from the kitchen and material from the
bathroom. Intrigued, the spectator has lost his bearings. An everyday
memory scrambles the noble message handed down from the traditions
of sculpture, which this example yet seems to respect to the letter.
The whole history of an art-form is overthrown by this object,
and the viewer begins to wonder what will become of it when it
starts to rain. With the sense of humour that is constant in her
character, Frédérique Nalbandian never lets go, playing
on shifting meanings and false pretences with a diabolical subtlety
that is far from innocent.
On the far side of the medicinal garden with its hallucinatory
virtues, you now find yourself in the vegetable garden. Like a
delicate piece of ceramic with a glaze one might think had been
prepared by Luca Della Robbia, a still-life with fruit stands on
a sturdy tripartite base. Probably a tribute to the gardener. Behind
the pile of apples and pears, to which three aubergines add their
elongated shapes, this carefully arranged accumulation makes you
think of a portrait in Arcimboldo style. Maybe that of La Quintinie,
designer of the King's Kitchen Garden, in Versailles. But suddenly
you think of all this in the great drought of July, followed by
the stormy showers of September. These delicate shapes will fade
and the imagined portrait of La Quintinie will probably look as
if it has passed through the hands of Giacometti. A ruined cheekbone
will not, however, suffice to eradicate its meaning. There will
be just as much human truth when erosion has disfigured these fragile
forms !
Frédérique Nalbandian has been working with this
very special material, soap, for several years. In the Galerie
des Ponchettes in Nice, she addressed the phenomenon of erosion
in reverse : first there was a bath of shapeless soap. But gradually,
throughout the exhibition, evaporation left behind a hard and mysterious
entity. This obscure, bituminous matter then became a "tableau".
Soap is the form of matter with which we are most intimate. It
shares our lives on a daily basis, under the shower. By a kind
of mimicry, as it gradually decomposes, soap takes on the form
of our bodies, the curve of our hands. It becomes human in the
process of disappearing, which explains why, for the spectator,
soap can never be cold or anonymous. Whence the symbolic power
it conveys in this garden : an industrial product made of a natural
product, it is like us, a tightrope-walker balanced between nature
and culture.
And precisely on the subject of rope, in the third garden of Les
Cordeliers, Frédérique Nalbandian makes a friendly
gesture to the monks, to their ample robes wrapped around their
bodies and secured by knotted ropes. A powerful column, of a man
firmly entrenched in his faith, has been installed at the edge
of the garden ; just as in the old days, the voluntary Franciscan
beggar remained on the sidelines of secular activities. This piece
contrasts with the others, firstly because of its colour. The robes
worn by the Cordelier monks were grey : blue dominates here. And
blue is always surprising in a garden, as it draws down something
from the sky into matters of the earth. Furthermore, these ropes
recall the sea-faring world - and azure-blue waves soon set us
adrift ! Rather than putting our trust in prayer, we already believe
we're out at sea, and this mast wound with slack ropes conjures
up some kind of Ulysses yielding to the sweet song of the Sirens,
despite Circe's' warnings, shrugging off the bonds that were supposed
to hold him back. All of which opens up an ironic and Mediterranean
horizon on the hills of Digne.
The column in the aromatic garden is the tallest of all. Or at
least, it was, for inclement weather has accomplished its task
of sapping its strength more quickly than one would have imagined.
So here it is today, lying softly in a bed of flowers. When I saw
it, it stood in the midst of white and mauve irises, giving its
erection an air of spring. With this column, Frédérique
Nalbandian was no longer thinking of either Gassendi or Giacometti.
This time, she was conversing with Brancusi. In fact, from the
first piece in the medicinal garden - the brain whose whiteness
contrasts with its pale ochre base -, we realise that the artist
is leading us towards issues which are not solely symbolic. The
confrontation of a brain with a trash can is one thing, but that
of a sculpture with its base, offered to us in a unique flow of
sensation, is quite another. We know that, in his studio, Brancusi
liked to move his sculptures from one pedestal to another, just
to see how each one of these forms would react to the other. For
him, the idea of the relationship between the sculpted form and
its base was so fascinating that he even went as far as to place
a base on a base. Which produced another sculpture. The relationship
between two volumes one to the other is the very essence of sculpture,
as Rodin well understood. His improbable assemblages were only
discovered very late on : he had kept them secretly hidden away
for himself in his studio in Meudon.
Frédérique Nalbandian is so imbued with this truth
that, in each of the four Gardens, she presents assemblages composed
of fragments, different volumes that she articulates one with the
other. The arrangement offered to the viewer makes him think that
he is faced by a Greek column bearing a sculpture, though he quickly
realises that he is mistaken, and is then confronted by the much
more radical issue of the composition, the mounting of
the various elements. The column in the romantic garden is no longer
a column bearing a sculpture, but a sculpture, from top to bottom,
as when Brancusi installed the Endless Column at Tirgu
Jiu. Frédérique Nalbandian's column could
also rise towards infinity, by means of repeated superimposition
of inverted trunks of cones, artfully stacked pieces of soap, whose
fragrance would drift in the wind and be ruined by the rain ; and
the fact that the catastrophe has already happened changes nothing
in the deal. Though the infinite aspect of the column only makes
sense in relationship to the vastness of the space in which it stands.
However, the spatial layout of the aromatic garden is in no way comparable
to the one in which Brancusi was working. In the Jardin des Cordeliers,
the space brings one's gaze earthwards, back towards the material
that has been used, the everyday memory conveyed by the mould, towards
the elegant and ironic assemblage enabling it to rise upwards. This
column would thus not be capable of reaching the sky ; it is totally
earthbound, because of its material and its deliberately limited
size - and, I would add, by the too hasty accomplishment of its destiny.
Finally, there would thus be no point in rebuilding it, proceeding
with what archeologists call an anastylosis, replacing it block by
block to restore its verticality. It has come back down to earth
in the very logic of its pre-assumed fragility.
One finds a pleasing consistency in the aromatic garden, rather
like a string of vivid metaphors.
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