Tribune La Croix - December 2020
I am a sculptor. Through an unpredictable affinity, I fell in love, at the age of 15, with the art of bronze. At the foundry, pungent odors, heavy dust and moments of eternity where the molten bronze, in its almost phosphorescent flow, lights up the eyes of men with a glimmer of fascinated fear, which centuries of practice have not been able to completely tame. The foundry was called Landowski, a family friendly to sculpture, related to the author of the Christ of Corcovado and the peaceful Saint Genevieve of the Pont de la Tournelle. This foundry has since been swallowed up in the silent din of an economy not friendly to expensive artistic craftsmanship.
Enriched by this extraordinary material, I sculpted. The infinitely sensitive earth was transformed into metal to the rhythm of these captivating flows, of these dresses of acid patinas laid under the flame of the blowtorch. To the young girl that I was, Didier Landowski made me realize that bronze had no known corruption, that it would last as long as our earth would last. Thus, the word eternity was pronounced, in the rays of light that fell on the small office in Bagnolet.
Forever ?
Are so many of our actions 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 is corrupted and eroded. Nature, for its part, knows how to draw from its sap the momentum of seasonal rebirths. But our human productions? They replace and succeed one another rather than persist. Even our beloved cathedral stones silently crumble, kept with great reinforcements of conservation that do not quite promise them eternity. As I walked through the sculpture museum of the Coubertin Foundation, I thought, seeing the great horse of General Alvear de Bourdelle or the warriors of Ousmane Sow, that they would be there, long after us, under thousands of other rains and other snows. It changed my vision of sculpture. For the time of my life, and my works that would remain after me. I followed Montaigne "If life is only a passage, on this passage at least let us sow flowers." While I had begun by saying something about human suffering, I turned my back on it definitively, not that it did not exist, but to leave indelible traces on this earth, I wanted them to be of grace and not of fear.
Art in the service of the sacred
Providence, with methodical insistence, has been soliciting me for years for projects of creations and liturgical arrangements in churches of all periods, from the 15th to the 21st centuries. Altars, ambos, tabernacles, Christ, and often all this choir to be tuned and brought to light. I had resolved to speak of what is luminous in man, I was asked to show what is luminous in God.
I then saw two things: the beauty of the human soul and the incorruptibility of the Mystery.
I walk across our beautiful land of France. TGV and TER lull 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 could not name all of these faces of priests, monks, women, men of good will, all ready with the audacity to undertake, with the energy of doing, with 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 is at the service of the spiritual. That art is the adjuvant of faith.
With these sponsors I realize more than ever that vigilance for beauty is one of the keys to transmission. As in the basilica of Saint-Avold where I transformed a vault disfigured by time into a starry dome before our amazed children's eyes, where I created a piece of furniture-light that is not a simple candle holder, but the Virgin's mantle in which we will place the flame of her trust and abandonment. My eye sees, thinks, creates through the eyes of all generations to come.
But above all, I become more aware every day of the incorruptibility of the Mystery, whatever the world's setbacks and violence. It was bronze that began to point it out to me by projecting my gaze beyond the familiar future. And then I dove into the treasures of the past to unite ancient works with a contemporary gesture, in jewelry. My perception of time was infinitely extended and I opened my eyes to a reality that went far beyond the temporality of my own life.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:5.
We are not only who we are. We are a long cohort that has been stretching for 2000 years in the footsteps of a man, and that repeats, takes up again, digs again with tireless confidence the words of the Gospel. We are not only our voices, singing or fighting, we are the long psalmic melody that rises towards the shadowy embrace of heaven. The baptismal water that flows on foreheads and mixes with the holy sweetness of the Chrism is forever changed. It is enough that we look in the face this divine Mystery, which glows like an ember in the depths of our hearts, that we delicately open this tent of meeting in the souls of children. The Eucharist, like a majestic sun, will continue to rise on the bronze horizon of the altars, to be carried in the silent triumph of the monstrances, fundamentally insensitive to the chaos of History, to its absurdities or its attacks, which have neither fruit nor memory. Because it radiates a light that is absolute and inexhaustible.