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Roger Descombes, a visionary artist

Article following the exhibition at "Galerie Club", May 1974

 

Every exhibition of Roger Descombes is an event in the field of art. This artist expresses himself with unusual power, using a plastic language which happens to be in perfect agreement with the visionary world disclosed by him.

A world of signs, of symbols where the human factor is linked with the vegetable, mineral and sideral world, not in the physiological-biological order, but in the upside-down aspect precisely resulting from the inward vision, where both conscious and unconscious are intimately entangled. Black or human-faced stars, solitary landscapes, straight or curved geometrical forms loom mysteriously, the weird counterparts of figures with human shapes, or disturbing like the gargoyles of cathedrals, at times monstrous: skinned bodies, a slithering visceral mass.vision

Roger Descombes makes his drawings and engravings undergo the decantation of linear purity, of the contrasting and grading of shades. The composition is perfectly structured, in the constant respect of the relationship of forms and spaces which fall into an equilibrium and harmony to the exclusion of any "loose ends".

This artist is a master of engraving. His wonderful technique has enabled him to engrave plants, flowers in a way which singularly enhances their beauty. An explorer of the preciseness of Nature, Roger Descombes can claim to be a visionary graphist. A patient, relentless worker, well-nigh a craftsman on account of the nobility of his craft, Roger Descombes draws the lines in complete freedom, in the great tradition of engravers for whom the copper-plate has no secret, or with a pencil entirely under the control of the creative hand.

Roger Descombes, the painter, is at home in the same inward world expressed by the quality of colours whose density and correlation reveal the same incantatory character. He experiments in the working of matter in reliefs of thick coloured paste, alternating with black spaces inside which are locked in forms vivified by a subtle modulation of tints.

Roger Descombes is the man who has known how to collect himself before life in order to discover its underlying message. His work is the eternal play of life and death, eroticism, love, spirituality and bestiality, purity cruelty, the transparence of things and of their destructive force.

(P.F.)
Translation by Maurice Pollet

P.F.