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Roger Descombes: Eroticism and the gaze

From the original article by Sylvio Acatos, "Construire" no 39, 25th. September 1974


 

Directed looks….

A man and woman, half undressed are shown back to back.

The monks fix with their gaze the naked body of a woman. A man and woman, half undressed are shown back to back, separated by the direction of their respective gazes. The only possibility for pleasure appears to be derived from the sight of this beautiful stranger unaware that she is being watched. The man is spying through the keyhole.

The long hair, parallel lines with curves, engraved tracery and curls, skirt the naked male abdomen. But already, the man is looking elsewhere; the prisoner of yet another spectacle.

Closed rooms and gazes where pleasure is derived from the detour.

These are voyeurs.

There are also those faces enclosed in an ellipse. There are those bellies fashioned from an ellipse. There are these men holding in their hands an ellipse...

There are regular, enclosing curves.

I am looking at one of the engraved hands which are very detailed with short, portly fingers. The hand is made to extend into five secant ellipses. I see other geometric shapes such as circles, rectangles, squares, triangles, arcs and parallel lines. The imagination compensates for some of the abstractions. That hand there, however, caresses and holds. We are faced with several options here. Should we possess or understand? At all times there surfaces troublesome desires from within us. Delineating the shape of an ellipse for example, might be mitigating disorder because an ellipse provides a rigorously defined geometric space, as does the circle.

There are many ellipses and there are, in addition, all those oval shapes, volumes which are traversed with a complex network of lines, sometimes only just suggested. The egg, a deformed ellipse, is the symbol of birth. It is the 'birth' of desires.

Through the keyhole, the man is spying...

Ellipses, circles, triangles provide simple geometric forms and concise images. Here engraved as an antidote to the entangled, meandering lines that engender in us strange and overwhelming desires. Those have the opposite effect to the straight angle or the perfect sphere -which is associated with reason, and we have a passion for order and clarity...

Man has compartmentalised space. He has substituted the open planes with walls. It is 'infinity of rooms'. Moreover, what is happening in ours is doubtless, much less interesting than what might be occurring in the room next door.

Roger Descombes likes compartmentalisation in his engravings. Within them, appear fragments of bodies. The side of a rectangle cuts a face, eliminates a portion. In this rectangle, is perceived a female head, in another, only a couple's legs are visible. Their universe is partitioned. We descend along corridors and at the corner of a wall, we slowly advance our head to look. The partition separates us from others, but just as it limits our view, it also sharpens expectant pleasure because linked to a progressive discovery.

Intimacy is never so much violated as when revealed to a stranger, from a distance and slowly.

The partitions enclose us. We do not desire to transcend these welcome boundaries. We are not looking to gain the totality of the vision. The partial view liberates the imagination.

Some shaded areas of indentations here; a woman just about to turn round and the light source providing definition. Here, there is a precise curve but a little higher up, there where we can no longer see, is the possibility of completing the curves for ourselves according to our own wishes or mind's eye. The stranger is all the more desirable with her inaccessibility.

Partitioning the world is multiplying our chances to gaze.

I am looking at that man sitting within a rectangle or that woman. They are isolated. For those that spy, words are uttered in vain. To be a voyeur is a lonely business.

I like this contrast: on the one hand the linear quality of the ellipse or the straight angles of the rectangle and on the other, the rich texture of the details.

Here are drawn multiple curved lines, the bark of the trees, the sumptuous vegetation and the texture of the walls. Here also, the treatment of the human body with the delineated muscles and tissues showing the networks of veins and arteries, the lobes and sinuosity of the brain. Hands and hair are painstakingly detailed and the stars seem endowed with a velvety surface. But in this abundance of lines, I feel that the motivation is not so much to do with reproducing anatomical detail with precision or to do with the exact representation of reality but rather, meant to stand as symbols of the complexities and elaborations of our innermost desires and erotic fantasies.

Three monks fix the body of a naked woman in their gaze.

Three monks fix the body of a naked woman in their gaze. Their clothes, faces (tense featured, sagging cheekbones, flaring nostrils, and hard-mouthed, pointed ears), hands and legs are a sum of details. The woman's body, on the other hand, is simply a folded form created only by a single curve.

Often the women is but a white surface devoid of detail; a transparent, clear space. Just one curved line defines her as it does the ellipse. There is this quest for purity, searched for through eroticism.

Partitioning is allowing the repetition of a situation or of an act to reoccur.

Very often, the image reappears again engraved on a smaller scale in the background a second time or even sometimes, three or four times.

Here there are three naked men standing in the same position partly obscured by a vertical line. Or is it the same man? Could it be 'reality' reflected in a succession of mirrors? Or perhaps, it is just one mirror reflecting a multiple image of the same event.

After all, instinct does drive many of our actions.

I reflect that man is indeed prone to some unhealthy curiosities. The woman appears to be more of a visual prey than something that is actually meant to be possessed. I tell myself that there are as many secrets in the erotic spectacle as there are in the act of love-making. We are all voyeurs by nature rather than by choice.

Nowadays, it is customary in the plastic arts to see mankind undergo all kinds of amazing mutations. It is a way of making critical statements about his actions in various domains. We only have to think of the robot-men of Richard Pagni or of Frank Anatole Wyss; the contortionist humanoids of Robert Matta or of Hans Giger or again, the strange creatures of Roland Topor or that of Claude Serre.

Roger Descombes also disfigures bodies, sometimes only the faces. I am looking at the mass of flesh, those bulbous parts, this assembly of oval volumes and those stocky limbs; those legs firmly pressing the ground, those muscular arms ready to enfold and the faces swollen with desire stuck to an 'opening'. The monks are lifting their robes of sack-cloth.

Roger Descombes is engraving not men but the meanderings of their sexual instinct.

Humanoid shapes and the lines from the rectangles and ellipses…Descombes traces exact geometric figures and rigorously organises the planes. The lines are put there to follow or direct us. They stabilise the forms and paralyse the actions of the protagonists. The 'horizon' - which is a distant line, is bare and determines what will be the décor: nudity. It is so for the cliffs or hills and the sometimes massive architectural forms that appears in the foreground. The network of vertical and horizontal lines anchors every shape or fragment of shape, to a precise location within the universe.

Engravings are a kind of palpable immobility.

Immobile, the man [in the engraving] looks through the keyhole. Immobile, the woman waits. Engraved in profile and 'set' in a heraldic pose, the men present ellipses. People turned to stone, condemned for ever to the same gesture and forever prisoners of the same spectacle. The curtain has been pulled aside; the door is ajar and at the precise moment when one was about to direct our gaze or cross the threshold, it appears that all life has ceased.

These are very possibly, forbidden spaces. Eroticism is perhaps akin to death, as with it, triumphs instinct over conscience.

But in the last analysis, who are we? Seeing? Acting? Inventing the language of robots?

[Referring to the engraving] 'Solitude' of 1974, the humanoid stands out against the background of a dead planet but nevertheless the area that is sky is 'cloudy' and appears 'shimmering' and 'undulating'. Here, I see like flames that are surrounding a bizarre human shape and there, some semi-circles which are modelled with minuscule irregular curves and some perforated spots and trails.

Instincts…We must not forget there is always the beauty of the world too like the sinuous quality of vegetation, les reflections of the oceans, the light and shadow caused by stars and planets. Moreover, sometimes from the 'clouds' emerges a 'naked woman'. She is engraved, borne from the richly adorned circles. It is the magnificence of a desire. Life is slowly being affirmed again.

Between reasoning and temptation, what are we to opt for? Surely, the ephemeral is important so that we are able to concord with the lasting metamorphosis of things.


Translation by Louise Descombes, April 2009
From the original article by Sylvio Acatos, "Construire" no 39, 25th. September 1974

Sylvio Acatos