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Notes d’art - At the Gallery Club Roger Descombes an anxiety promoting artist

Critic which appeared in the Geneva newspaper 'Tribune de Genève' at the beginning of Mai 1974.

An anxiety promoting artist capable of generating unease in those contemplating his images; at least this is the impression gained with the works by Roger Descombes actually on show at the moment at the Gallery Club. I had hitherto spoken of Roger Descombes with reference to an exhibition of his botanical engravings at the ‘Cabinet des estampes’ and today one can see a few of these again.  They are truly admirable in terms of their technical precision allied with a poetical quality reminiscent of the grand tradition of natural history engraving of bygone centuries. However, I shall not repeat myself on these perfectly executed works.  No, the anxiety producing elements does not reside here but rather in other engravings and paintings.

Indeed, Roger Descombes is the author of engravings whose stylistic precision reminds one of masters such as Bracquemond and Félicien Robs but where intellectual eroticism is an all important and overriding characteristic. 

For example, here is the seated [historian] “Michelet” yet with a look as bestial as that of an anthropoid and squeezing between his legs an extremely small nude female.       

 

Here is “Susanna at her bath” with a sophisticated hairstyle but very aggressively bare to her knees, her breast hard and forward-thrusting, while in the background, the elders snort at her with indignation and push out their stomachs too. 

 

Here again, in another engraving “L’enfantement par le viol” or “Conception by rape”, there appears a women who could be the twin sister of this “Susanna” with the announced violent scene depicted in the background. 

 

In “Les Amuseurs” or “The Entertainers”, there is a squat man also with a somewhat bestial face and riding him, a frenetic- looking girl. In “Femme et enfants” or “Women with Children”, one of the most disturbing of this set of engravings, one sees a large standing nude with her sex open, breast-feeding and with a serpent entwined around her leg while a clothed boy with an ugly face accentuates the morbidity of this image.  The juxtaposition of the garments and dehumanised features on the one hand with the bareness and very human feminine aspect of the women constitute marked contrasts.  Same contrasts as in the “Michelet” image.  All this promotes a feeling of unease even more accentuated by the sharpness of the execution.

The oil paintings are also strange but differently so. They are engraver’s paintings in that the vigour and intensity of the drawing or linear quality is unusually pronounced but they are at the same time, very much painterly works in that they demonstrate most innovative handling of the medium and very interesting tonal uses of colour.  Paintings of monumental quality where washed-out blues predominate; where there are whites and blacks counter pointed by a few vivid colours, works with strong bold structural compositions.

Paintings in which hands and feet play a singular role with hands which sometimes are in themselves the only subject or are, as elsewhere, immense as in the painting “La Crucifixion” or multiplied as in “L’Extrème-Onction” or  “The Sacred Anointing”.  At other times, there are hands veined like marble and sometimes signed with hate. 

One cannot stay indifferent to the art of Roger Descombes; a very strong personality indeed.

 

 

Translation by Louise Descombes Mai 2010

A.A. K. TRIBUNE DE GENEVE