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EXHIBITION ROGER DESCOMBES

Article on the exhibition which took place at the gallery “La Gravure” that was owned by Madame Pierre Cailler (the well known Swiss book publishers). It affords a useful analysis of the artist’s method of working when engraving.

 

Roger Descombes is the guest artist at the gallery “La Gravure” in Pully (Lausanne) until the 10th July.  This is incontestably a very great exhibition because the fifty dry point engravings on show there are synonymous with absolute purity.

Purity of form first of all, because Descombes, who from the start of his engraving does not know what he will delineate, is guided by his subconscious. One form leads to another. A line made will promote a second one. There is in Descombes’ engraving an alliance of marks and lines made by him which gives his drawing a homogenous whole. His engraving can be ‘read’ without any interruption just like the free-flowing rhythm made by the outline of an egg when it is viewed because it is a perfect form.

Purity in the message also, in that once Descombes has incised the first lines almost haphazardly, in total freedom, he sees appearing from these first lines an idea, a signification, a theme.  From then on, it’s only a question of letting his hand run over the surface of the copper plate. The drawing is in him; he can ‘see’ it in its entirety as though already engraved on the plate.  All that he needs to do is to ‘trace’ over with the steel point of his burin the lines. It is from this that  the surrealist quality of Descombes’ works comes about; promoting a certain kind of freedom. I would go further and call it a total freedom of expression linked to an accumulation of thoughts arrived at by him second by second.

One finds in Descombes’ works the big themes that have preoccupied mankind from the dawn of time and which form the essential matter of Pascal’s œuvre too. That is, the questions of life and death, what is and what has been, nostalgia for the passing of time, woman as a symbol of purity but forced like man to make her way through life’s harsh realities. “Let us imagine a body full of thinking limbs” said Pascal. This statement, it seems to me, could just as well serve as a summary of Descombes’ work.   Once he has started engraving, as soon as the idea is born, then nothing is any longer gratuitous to the artist. Every gesture made carries with it a deep signification as born out of the very action of engraving itself and not premeditated by him beforehand. 

A “Surrealist”, we said, a “Symbolist”, we have also implied, and with regards to Descombes, we need to add to these labels the term “meditative”.  This meditative quality is even possibly the one most important feature of this work which carries with it all the weight of human destiny. A destiny evoked by the artist with blazing integrity and with a spiritual force which seems to have gathered its strength from oriental wisdom.

Translation by Louise Descombes, October 2010.

B.-P.Cruchet