The Franco-Chinese relationship experienced by five members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts is on display today at the Musée Marmottan Monet. Their works sit happily next to those of Monet in these galleries housing as they do the emblematic Summit of Impressionism. The freshness of Monet’s water lilies is echoed by the works of Jean-Marie Granier, Albert Féraud, Claude Abeille, Antoine Poncet, Chu Teh Chun. Each has mastered a particular language enabling their intellect and skill to create an artistic identity.
For Jean-Marie Granier, the tools are those of engraving. It is appropriate to remember the role played by this modest man in the very museum which he directed for many years before his death last year. His chisel, a beveled steel rod with a boxwood handle, gave life to a world of black and white. Granier was a dedicated engraver; he produced his series on the art of bullfighting without renouncing the classicism of his Cévennes landscapes but also created abstract compositions. The chisel describes and expresses life through the bite and caress of the line. Copperplate engraving is a game of light and shadows on a polished copper plate; it invites silence and contemplation.
Albert Féraud who died last January has ennobled stainless steel. He transformed scrap metal into a baroque world where improvisation, slashing cuts, folds and welds were his language. Masses of folds, distortions and bubblings create crown like forms where intuitive rhythms link fullness and emptiness in a mingling of sprouting shapes. With Féraud, opposites are creative: randomness calls for order, creativity is the servant of freedom, this carries risk but is also the launch pad for a constant awareness. Epic and lyrical, his sculpture is driven by musical rhythms creating a general harmony and a monumentality whose energy displays an organic plenitude and a dash for fraternity.
A sculptor of shapes, Claude Abeille gives order to an agitated humanity where outer clothing replaces the body, where pleats become the emblem of expression. His choice of plaster which can be cast later allows him to express infinitely repeated depths. His material allows the fading away of each figure replaced by swollen folds or pacified by a floating coat, an outsize jacket from which emerges an anonymous head and arms. His draperies are sloughs and shrouds expressing the mystery of being, the faint traces one leaves in the world. These variations have led him recently to the theme of dance where Abeille experiments with colour using polychromatic resins. Playfulness accompanies poetry, tender and nostalgic, towards a new impetus.
The sculptures of Antoine Poncet are in the tradition of organic informal sculpting. His dreams in stone, to use Arp’s phrase, brings us back to the voluptuousness of veined marble or the polish of bronze. Imprinted with vibrant sensitivity and in constant harmony with an outer shell which cries out to be touched, his creative world is based on dynamic forms, human or vegetal, hewn from the block in the ancestral way, a hymn to life created by spatial tension. One by one flames, wings, the outlines of female forms, as suggested by the mischievous titles ( Cororéol, Aileiotrope, Olivailes), the sculpted masses project their impetus and vitality in curves and spirals, audaciously free and calling for a dialogue with nature.
From his Chinese origins, Chu Teh Chun has kept the vigour of the Chinese painter’s stroke, the inward contemplation and the cosmic dimension of the landscape. All these he confronts with his knowledge of western painting. His pictorial adventure makes him a protagonist of lyrical abstraction. Abandoning all figurative reference, he experiments with pictorial space, which has become a space-time for a pantheistic metaphor. He paints a reinvented nature, based on elements of graphic and chromatic resonances held in his memory. His language is composed of signs, of mutated forms, of lyrical explosions, of sound and colour contrasts evoking the rhythms of the universe, the ebb and flow of water and of light. His paintings are places of multiple meetings, orchestrated by the ardour of writing, the flow of colour, the inherent energy of matter, creating a poetic space where imagination joins a fundamental geography. With the painting of Chu Teh Chun we see something invisible made visible by the reality of his landscapes.
