Tribune La Croix - December 2020
I'm a sculptor. By an unforeseeable affinity, I fell in love with the art of bronze at the age of 15. At the foundry, pungent smells, heavy dust and moments of eternity when molten bronze, in its almost phosphorescent pour, lights up the eyes of men with a gleam of fascinated fear, which centuries of practice have not quite been able to tame. The foundry's name was Landowski, a sculpture-loving family, related to the creator of the Christ of Corcovado and the peaceful Saint Geneviève of the Pont de la Tournelle. The foundry has since been swallowed up in the silent clatter of an economy unfriendly to costly arts and crafts.
Rich in this extraordinary material, I sculpted. The earth, infinitely sensitive, was transformed into metal to the rhythm of these subjugating pours, these dresses of acid patinas laid under the flame of the blowtorch. Didier Landowski made me realize that bronze had no known corruption, that it would last as long as our earth would last. And so the word eternity was uttered, in the streaks of light that fell on the little office in Bagnolet.
Forever?
Are there so many of our deeds that remain forever? Love, I believe, is invisibly inscribed in the book of the soul, beyond life and death. But materially? Everything in our world corrupts and erodes. Nature, on the other hand, knows how to draw from its sap the impetus of seasonal rebirths. But our human productions? They replace and succeed one another rather than endure. Even the beloved stones of our cathedrals are silently crumbling, heavily preserved in ways that don't quite promise eternity. As I strolled through the sculpture museum of the Fondation de Coubertin, I reflected on Bourdelle's great horse of General Alvear or Ousmane Sow's warriors, that they would be there, long after us, under thousands of other rains and snows. This changed my vision of sculpture. For the rest of my life, and the works that would remain after me. I followed Montaigne, "If life is but a passage, let us at least sow flowers on that passage." While I had begun by saying something about human suffering, I turned my back definitively on it, not that it didn't exist, but to leave indelible traces on this earth, I wanted them to be of grace and not dread.
Art in the service of the sacred
Providence, with methodical insistence, has been calling on me for years for liturgical creation and fitting-out projects in churches of all periods, from the 15th to the 21st centuries. Altars, ambos, tabernacles, Christ, and often the whole choir to be tuned and highlighted. I had resolved to talk about what is luminous in man, but was asked to show what is luminous in God.
I saw two things: the beauty of the human soul and the incorruptibility of the Mystery.
I roam our beautiful land of France. TGVs and TERs take me from valleys to meadows, from the warm North to the sunny South, from misty mornings to fiery sunsets. Each time I discover treasures of stone. And treasures of beings. I can't name them all, these faces of priests, monks, women and men of good will, all ready to take on the audacity of undertaking, the energy of doing, the confidence that beauty can be born from creation, and that this beauty is a gift to be given to our world. That the material can be transfigured when it serves the spiritual. That art is the adjuvant of faith.
With these clients, I realize more than ever that vigilance to beauty is one of the keys to transmission. As at the Basilica of Saint-Avold, where I transformed a vault that had become ugly with age into a starry dome before our astonished children's eyes, where I created a piece of light furniture that was not simply a candle-holder, but the mantle of the Virgin in which we would place the flame of our trust and abandonment. My eye sees, thinks and creates through the eyes of all the generations to come.
But above all, I'm becoming more aware every day of the incorruptibility of the Mystery, whatever the world's setbacks and violence. It was bronze that first pointed this out to me, projecting my gaze beyond the familiar future. Then I plunged into the treasures of the past to unite ancient works with a contemporary gesture, in jewelry. My perception of time was infinitely expanded, and I opened my eyes to a reality far beyond the temporality of my own life.
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not stopped it." John 1:5.
We are not just who we are. We are a long cohort that has been stretching out for 2000 years in the footsteps of one man, repeating, repeating, recreating with tireless confidence the words of the Gospel. We are not just our voices, singing or fighting, we are the long psalmic melody that rises towards heaven's shadowy embrace. The baptismal water that flows over our foreheads and mingles with the holy sweetness of chrism is forever changed. All we have to do is look into the face of this divine Mystery, which glows like an ember in the depths of our hearts, and delicately open this tent of encounter in the souls of children. As for the Eucharist, like a majestic sun, it will continue to rise over the brazen horizon of the altar, to be carried in the silent triumph of the monstrance, fundamentally unaffected by the chaos of history, its absurdities or its attacks, which have neither fruit nor memory. For it radiates a light that is absolute and inexhaustible.