skip to Main content | skip to Nav

Notes d’art Roger Descombes

An article by Pierre Thée following the exhibition at the "Cabinet des Estampes" in Geneva which took place from the 24th September 1955 to the 4th january 1956.


An artist of such stature, of such maturity, with such a grasp over the most elusive or harrowing visions of his protracted dream, such an alchemist of the image deserves that we should feel attached to him with a mixture of gratitude and awe. Indeed, the drawings and drypoints exhibited in the Cabinet des Estampes, besides their sophisticated technical qualities, surprise us by their cosmic impact and spiritual vistas - rather disturbing in the last analysis. But apart from their disquieting aspect - nothing in common with the "fantastic" character of pictures designed to frighten us, i.e., play on our nerves, by arousing in us epidermic impulses - Roger Descombes' art offers substantial compensations on the psychic level, nurtured as it is by the prodigious accumulation of intuitive data whose handling through a smooth, precise 'craft" produces in us a healthy shock. Witchcraft is no longer to be feared nowadays, since it is being laughed at. Yet, genius, at all times, has been akin to witchcraft when it manifests itself. Then, we are faced with a problem: either we have to deal with a solar, protean character in the manner of Picasso the engraver and we are baffled by the infinite variety of his formulations or we are confronted with the esoteric enigmas conjured up in Dürer's work for instance (I have in mind especially his Melancholia...) and we fail to grasp the significance of its symbols, even though they exert an appeal, which we may distrust vaguely. In any case, whether it be through the "extensive" possession (in space and through movement) of the world around us or through an "intensive" concentration on the signs and meanings of such a world, the artist who can "see", (the seer, according to Rimbaud) invites us to become aware - as a result of a skilful heating of the mind worked up with our connivance - of super-realities, or surrealities. There, we actually touch upon one of the essentials of the Geneva engraver's art: his clearsightedness, (or might we say his clairvoyance) that switches us into contact with a world which we manage merely to glimpse in our dreams, the world of the subconscious under the pressing promptings of which the artist organizes his magic...

In Descombes' work, Man is inscribed inside a necessary geometry, human time is translated by a quaint repetition of identical figures on the same white sheet; the river is one long unrolling of wavy hair; a woman's pregnancy reaches to the grandeur of a cosmic event; the acrobat defies gravity; the "army" is a deep perspective in which the row of men, faintly sketched, stands opposite a row of women, with their heads turned away. Why? Why? The symbolism is obvious, yet challenges any interpretation. As a matter of fact, any interpretation is treason in the field of oniric creation and it is appropriate to give up for a while, for the time of one of those dives into the irrational, our little Cartesian habits of thought.

One does not resist the urges of a spiritual adventure if the motivations of the adventure themselves answer the mysterious demands of an inner necessity. Therefore, one accepts to be led in all confidence, one passes through narrow gates to discover the precise avenues of a world where the pulse of the blood and the circulation of the air have nothing in common with the natural pulse and circulation, where the landscape is cut down to the mere lines signifying its power. where the human hand is shown as an object of high-grade precision stripped of its normal use; where the human foot has lost its function as a prop and support to become the very image of that wonder conceived by God the Creator; where the eye is analysed in its mechanism and terribly complex, logical minuteness as a spacerecording gadget. The art of an anatomist then, or a philosopher, or an engraver working with a magnifying glass, or a photographer with a telelens? It would be all that indeed if such art did not have a meaning, i.e., a destiny which anyhow escapes us - as it must - and a deep sensuality which acts as a bridge and a language of communication. We are far from the plastician, formal or not, for whom the play of colours, volumes and lines are the supports of a lyricism or a special drama: Descombes' opus, both engraved and painted, is a homage to whatever the most familiar objects contain in the way of invisible and unchangeable beauty: in mystical language, it is the humble, innocent expression of the prayer of things seen by the common man as objects, but which the "believer", provided he be gifted with sufficient sensibility, manages to vitalize, to magnetize enough to endow them with the value of subjects of a unique creation. The oval of a face, the pure line of a nape, engraved on the canvas as if with an etching point, the aristocracy of the drawing as well as the careful consideration for a dash of colour, be it even the complicity of chance which accounts for the craquelure in the matter, everything concurs to giving, through the concentration of the artist and the contribution of all the aspects of art, the kind of primeval robustness and elegance akin to the anonymous vestigiae of the great civilizations of the past.

I dare believe that Roger Descombes has in him what it takes to open new vistas in religious art; I mean an art of symbolic figuration in close contact with the mysterious essence of things.

Pierre Thée
Tribune de Genève, 18th October 1955

Translation by Maurice Pollet, 1982

Pierre Thée