Jean Amado sculptor
1922-1995

           Rupture and continuity...words of a son, in this case Manu, Emmanuel Amado, in front of the small crowd of relatives, amateurs, all privileged who had warmly gathered to greet this sumptuous implantation of some very large pieces of his father's work exposed in the park of Paul Cezanne's house, in the Jas de Bouffan, for the series of exhibitions organized in several places of the city to mark the importance and the uninterrupted local life of the work of the sculptor... The setting and the stage are finally worthy of welcoming this taciturn magnitude, this breath, this aerial gravity. Indeed, what cannot fail to strike the visitor, even initially distracted, it is this way in which at the first glance the big off-center nave, in the series known as the 'cliffs, that Jean Amado entitled in an emblematic way The Doubt and the Stone, takes root (or, perhaps better still, sails) sovereignly in the middle of a vast expanse of grass of the park, with its splayed alley of tutelary plane trees, and majestically makes piece with the classicism of the old Aix bastide, without an iota of clash or incongruity. Certainly, there is a rupture - the tsunami of the years of modernism that Alain Paire knows so well how to evoke in his conferences, has indeed passed through there, and everything has been turned upside down several times in the social relationships and in the visions of the world, of knowledge and of art - but there remains, after all, after the passage of the wave, of so many waves, something that has the flavour of a continuity. This continuity between the still slightly baroque classicism of the Cézanne bastide and the torn, but now classic (or in the process of becoming so) modernism of Amado's sculpture, it is beyond the accidents of the material and the distortions of the surface that one must go and look for it: it is undoubtedly located at the level of the form.

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          Indeed, it is enough to seize this rare chance to have a more comprehensive view, for example, by impregnating oneself with several pieces of this same series of 'cliffs' (at the Jas de Bouffan, but also in the cloister and the park of the Baume d'Aix, at the Atelier de Cézanne and in the Galerie de la rue du Puits Neuf), to convince oneself of this: beyond the faults, the tears and the vast tectonic tensions that work through these steles, in a trans-human epic that is simultaneously mineral and organic, geological and archaeological, beyond the almost infinite drama and brokenness (against which there is nothing left to shelter us), there is something even more immense (that soothes and consoles us), the rest of the form. Didn't Nietzsche already say (somewhere in Thus Spoke Zarathustra): What can save us? - The sight of perfection. Perhaps this is where his secret agreement with classicism lies? I find in it - and with what strength and breadth of vision! - something of what I had already tried some time ago to define (or better to pose) starting from the work of the painter Claude Garanjoud: 'a classicism of the transfinite'...

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          Moreover, to deepen this question, which is precisely that of the form, there is nothing better than to be able to linger on the drawings of the sculptor. Alain Paire's gallery, at the end of what remains of the welcoming labyrinth of the old city (rue du Puits Neuf), offers us this opportunity. There are about twenty large drawings on display, sometimes preparatory to the sculpted works, sometimes autonomous, in a cleverly orchestrated dialogue with smaller pieces of sculpture and bronzes. These drawings, with the precision and meticulousness of an architect's plan, show the sculptor's obsession with space as a kind of absolute. More precisely, his obsession with the n-dimensional form, which pushes space to its extreme limits (almost to the point of what one might call hyperspace). Thus it seems to lead our glances beyond the earth, towards a future world where the power of the abstraction and the human adventure meet fatally: it is not for nothing that Jean Amado will have for nothing that Jean Amado was, I am told, a great reader of Science Fiction. But it is not to install us in some purely imaginary scientistic beyond or nostalgic escape in boomerang towards an unhealthy metaphysics of junk. It is quite simply, I believe, his way of great survivor to continue the adventure of the living. Fortunately, the sculptures of more modest size are there to sculptures are there to remind us of this - by persisting in their strangeness of cyborgs, mutants and hybrids, but also not without a certain humor of new marvelous. Some of these sculptures - one, for example, with a tapir head, tank and armadillo body, another, The Departure, with insect legs, a cross between a grasshopper and a space scooter - are endowed with such a stubbornly intense life that one has the impression that they have just arrived by their own means, or that they are waiting for the moment to escape cunningly from the gallery and sneak away to pursue who knows what mysterious molts in the twisting alleys of the city! (Perhaps the Prefecture and the new Ministry of National Identity should be informed...!)

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          Thus, thanks to this free and somewhat nomadic (or hopscotch-like) route through the

city, one can venture a few general views. It seems to me that Amado's work has both what

could be called a 'new monumentality' that is almost post-modern (I'm thinking of Gianni

Vattimo), and at the same time a concern and a breadth of the historical that deepens to the

point of becoming 'trans-historical', that is to say, to include all the epic of the living, and that

could tie him into the optimistic and scientistic 'High Modernism' of the decades after '45.

It is by this side that he is inescapably close for me to another gigantic figure (and nowadays

too much ignored) of the Aix-en-Provence creation, a patchwork or of adoption this time, but

which, in spite of certain appearances, has also a link with the radical modernity: Saint-John

Perse (a little further on I will try to justify this connection between their two 'poetics', that

some will not fail to find somewhat surprising...).  

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          As regards first of all the 'new monumentality', it seems to me that there is in Amado something like an anthropological deepening of this fundamental act of the man liberated by the station upright that introduces him in the verticality, allowing the distance of the glance at the same time as the erection of the memorial trace. I say 'new monumentality', because I believe in particular that in his steles, Amado, in consonance with this radicality of the modernity of the Fifties and Sixties, works in an evident way in reverse of all that the idea of monument has been able to represent historically, and in subversion of the notion of official monument. Here the art of the sculptor doesn't put itself anymore to the service of the "imaginary institution of the society" fixing the myths of the gods or exalting the too often counterfeited heroism of the men in the hardness of the stone inseparable of the state duration and its conquests (and as confiscated and trivialized by this one to the point to become invisible). With Amado, if there is heroism, it is indeed that of the living and, almost subsidiarily, that of the social man, whose presence is essentially felt through his absence, an omnipresent archaeological metaphor. But in his work, all civilizations have always been defeated, the dwellings as if sacked by war, or emptied by a pandemic, an earthquake or the fall of an asteroid, all battles lost in advance - even if it is clear that life, sometimes through its humblest (or most mischievous) manifestations, persists and persists.  

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This is why I spoke of an 'epic of the living', including the living in man, in its dimension of radical rupture with history, its myths, its dreams and its mortifying lies, to go towards a taking into account - possibly tragic, but finally lucid (here is modernity!) - of reality. This epic is not historical in the sense of the histories of men, of their tribes, of their nations, of their pantheons and other delirious, bloody and perishable 'imaginary institutions', it is trans-historical, that is to say, a history crossing - and possibly subverting - all other histories, as well as the borders between peoples, species, orders, knowledge, kingdoms: a resolutely modern and universal history. I believe that Jean Amado wanted to try to give us, to leave us something like the monument(s) of this history: something that takes us against the grain, by the oblique, troubles us and upsets us: a counter-monument to the heroism of the living and to the history of the earth (and even, without doubt, beyond that, something like a sketch of a history of the future of the living in space! That is undoubtedly why, alongside others, thinkers, artists, men of letters, scientists of those years of the classical Modernity (I think of Braudel, of the school of the Annals, of Borges, of Malraux and his 'Musée Imaginaire', of Teilhard de Chardin, to Chronique de Saint-John Perse, among many others) - and although already burdened by the memory of the darkest tragedies - he desired passionately, he believed possible by his art to make (us) reach this new conscience of the real, to fundamentally renew our vision. 

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          This is what makes him a major and representative artist, but at the same time, almost paradoxically, roots it undoubtedly deeply in what one could call the of this land, of this city where he was born.  From this arcane place, in spite of all that can immensely separate them in the time, by the choice of the means of expression or by the thought of expression or by the thought, it is undoubtedly Paul Cézanne himself who has the best key. Aix has long been a place of thought, a place where the inhabitants of the bastides of the bastides and the regulars of the Cours des Carrosses have always wanted to discuss the world, to erect buildings and laws, to think the real from a certain balance. Cézanne has made it for the whole world the place of an epiphany of the incipient modernity, that of a theophany of the immanence: the paradise could be again here below (here even!), the divine repatriated on earth in the majestic permanence of the form through the tasty shimmer of the appearances. Jean Amado, living in these same bastides a generation later, is the son of a much more tormented time. We can even say that he is a great survivor of the upheavals of modernity - he saw the convoys of the death camps up close, he was involved in the resistance. But through all that in his life (and then in his art) was upheaval, monstrous mutation and brokenness, he was inhabited by the same concern for immanent form. Like Cézanne with his Sainte Victoire, a new Fuji-Yama or sacred mountain of a post-Christian age, Amado and his tormented steles to the heroism of the earth are deeply rooted here in the permanence of the country.

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Amado also has his Japan. It is undoubtedly part of the logic of the exhibition to suggest, in a very natural way, that we discover other exhibits - some of which seem to have just emerged from the ground, others about to go off on a tangent in the thicket or to take the key to the fields - in the garden of Cézanne's studio. While great exhibitions of the last few years (Toulouse-Lautrec and Japan in Albi, Van Gogh, alongside Hokusaï, Hiroshige and Utamaro in Arles) have already underlined for the Western public the importance of the influence of Japanese classical painting on our impressionists and post-impressionists, For several decades now, Cézanne's studio has become a de facto place of pilgrimage for visitors and art lovers from Japan who have flocked to the studio, no doubt plebiscising the great painter from Aix as one of their own. It is therefore particularly appropriate to encounter here Amado's pieces such as Vaugeisha, set in an aquatic environment that strongly resembles a Zen garden, or this masterful Bogue, which seems to be both a kind of primitive cosmic egg that has just broken to give birth to the multitude of forms in the universe, and at the same time - so much the formal power in the sculptor gives birth to phenomena of de-dimensioning quasi hallucinatory - a strange spaceship in perdition in some dark epic ('space opera') of Science Fiction. This setting seems therefore particularly right, notably because it allows to put to light this taciturn and fierce side of the work and the materials of Amado, this 'aesthetic (apparently!) anti-aesthetic', that, besides the fact that it is a generic feature of the modernity, finds so 'naturally' its filiation on the side of the Zen aesthetic of the breaking, the shaggy and the singular. 

          So, Saint-John Perse and the high-energy shimmering of his rhetorical and poetic

'great organs', you might ask, what do they have in common with this sober and visionary,

almost taciturn art (were it not for the smile of the low-angled light on the basaltic warmth

of the sandstone in every season)?  It is no longer a question of pure form and idea, but of

poetics, of discourse, of narrative. I believe that there is nothing superficial about it.

As I had the opportunity to write a few years ago in a special issue of the journal Détours

d'Écritures devoted to his relationship with painting and visual artists, Saint-John Perse is

not only this somewhat stilted author declaiming immense leashes of pantheistic celebration

which one has often led to believe would be wearying because of their grandiloquent or

purely ornamental rhetoric: he is above all the creator of a new radical, even revolutionary

poetics (which I called at the time, by glossing over the poet's name itself, a kind of

Apocalypse of language). I believe moreover even that it is first of all thanks to this

somewhat deepened approach of the poetics of Saint-John Perse that I was able to begin

little by little to find by groping my first and keys of entry in the work of Jean Amado.

Without dwelling too much here on the technical aspects (which are however fascinating!),

I will content myself with quoting some of these keys, and to try to illustrate them briefly. 

What is useful to remember here, first of all, in Saint-John Perse, is that he is the creator of

a new complex rhetoric and a new poetics which have, in spite of certain appearances

(i.e. in parodic form), have little to do with traditional rhetoric, poetics and stylistics. We have seen that the same thing is eminently true of the sculptor, especially with regard to monumentality. We have seen that in Amado, this becomes a kind of diverted and subversive monumentality, a counter-monumentality. In the same way in Perse, the pomp and the pomp of the ancient and ceremonial rhetoric are used in a diverted way, so as to reconduct them by exalting them, to exceed them and to "spend" them by carrying them to the paroxysm. What interests Perse is not at all to return to old rhetoric with relief after the tiring hiatus of modernity, but, after the shock of World War II and under the pressing threat of the destruction of humanity represented by nuclear weapons and the arms race, to reconnect with - and re-convoke in an almost ritualistic way - the poetic powers of the adventure of all human cultures. This is what I have tried to call his 'General Poetics' (or Apocalypse of language) which introduces in his work a kind of 'general relativity' of the word. There is thus transposition and "universalization" of the rhetoric/poetics in Saint-John Perse, as there is transposition (and thus universalization) of the monumentality in Amado. Both operate in complex rhetorics, and practice 'trans-figuration', or figuration squared.

          All this becomes even more true, it seems to me, when we put in parallel the way they approach each one of their side the history, the historical narrative. One thing that cannot fail to strike one in Amado's large sculptures (and finally also in the small ones, but in their own, more playful and anecdotal way) is that they are not only abstractions or more or less figurative figures: they are narratives. But stories of what, the spectator asks himself while contemplating them? Well, for me, it is Saint-John Perse again who provides the key: they are stories of stories. That is to say, stories transposed, trans-figured, squared. Each of his sculptures (especially the big ones) is a kind of story (and even a 'story of history', that is to say a kind of general metaphor of history, of all possible stories, from the evolution of the mineral, geological, zoological world, to the epic, often tragic of the human history - some parts of his big sculptures resemble, for example, Massada, Montségur or a war scene of SF or comic strip, but always 'metaphorized', translated in abstract idea. ..).

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In the same way, there exists in Saint-John Perse what Antoine Raybaud, in his essay Exil Palimseste, named the surfiguration. These are complex figures, composed of metaphors and metonymies, figures of figures (a good example is provided by the Persian use of historical proper names representing metonymically, or by synecdoche, a given history or epic, which in turn metaphorically figures the anabasis, the conquering or human adventure in its glory, its excess, its vanity etc.). They are thus metaphorical metonymies). Thus "The great Seleucid stories with the whistle of the slings... " certainly denotes metonymically the exploits of the Macedonian captain Seleucus and his descendants who founded a state of high civilization in the center of Asia Minor after the dismemberment of the Empire, but in the poem of Persia, it is above all about "a category of varied enterprises having such characters of violence, of which the Seleucid affairs are felt as the type" for connotative purposes, (thus metaphorically), to designate all the fragile and doomed imperial adventures of the same type. A rather comparable example at the plastic level in Jean Amado could be his use of more or less medieval towers and ramparts, as well as balconies and suspended terraces recalling archeological sites of a more or less determined period (denotation) but without being able to clearly identify either their function or their origin (connotation). In fact, as with Saint-John Perse, one perceives them rather as very poignant metonymies of the drama of human history in all its heartbreaking extent. In other words, the archaeological as metaphor. One can thus photograph these sculptures as if they were archaeological objects; but, provided not to forget that they belong to an 'archaeology of the archaeology', that is to say of an archaeological account brought to the abstract, of an 'archetypal archaeology'...

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          It seems to me interesting, to conclude, to put the accent in Jean Amado on another factor (or process) which is also present in the poetics of Saint-John Perse: the generic disenclavement. In Amado's work, one never quite knows in which kingdom of nature one is - the mineral, the vegetable, or the animal. And above all one passes everywhere without warning from the natural order to the cultural order: from the geological to the archaeological, from the seismic to the socio-historical, from the zoological to the mechanical; everywhere genres, orders and kingdoms overlap and cross-pollinate in a rather

joyful, - but also potentially monstrous - promiscuity that is the very one of life. Hybridization

and transformism (even cloning) reign over this work which celebrates - yes, finally, it too, it

seems to me - the epic of life. But it is also not without its dystopian side, pertaining to the

negative utopia, the Apocalypse of Science Fiction. Which brings us back to the important

fact that this very rich work, which we are once again fortunate enough to be able to

contemplate with something like an overview, is indeed that - the cry of revolt and

resistance - of a survivor. History is a nightmare from which I seek to awaken', wrote

James Joyce. The hybrid animals - machines, other cyborgs, mutants and nice clones that

we have to keep an eye on are less of a cabinet of curiosities, of counterpoetics and of a reversed

Kafkaesque universe where it would be the good mood and the obstinate goodness of the monsters that would show the way of salvation to the men. They would therefore be excellent 'pets'.

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What I retain finally (but also, provisionally, because I hope to be able to contemplate for a long time still some of these works implanted finally definitively on their 'natural' urban sites) of the work of demiurge of Jean Amado, it is the courage and the extreme meticulousness with which he knew to return, in a time and in a place certainly still favorable to the creation, his essential gesture to the sculpture. I hope that the smiling and august city where he was born and which for so long accompanied the blossoming of this gesture does not deny itself the happiness of giving a place or two of permanence to some major pieces of a work which so deeply translates his tutelary (at least, we can still hope) 'genius of the place'. In the meantime, I don't think that he (the Taciturn!) would be offended if, to conclude this walk in his company so full of emotions and ardent thoughts, I were to quote a little more the great voice of the one who, having become our fellow citizen and his brother in arms, has guided me so surely to the foot of his great 'cliffs' of the end of the earth: "Ah, that a great style should surprise us, in our years of wear and tear, that should come to us from the sea and from farther away, ah! May a wider meter chain us to that greater account of things by the world, behind all things of this world, and may a wider breath in us arise, which is to us like the sea itself and its great foreign breath! "

http://www.galerie-alain-paire.com

Innisfree, 09. 06. 2008