Entre vagues et rivages...
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AUTOPORTRAIT
Ka.Ty DESLANDES |
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Entre vagues et rivages...
"BORD'MER DEPONIE" |
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L’art des rivages de Ka.Ty Deslandes
Géopoétique de l’Océan Indien The Shore Art of Ka.Ty Deslandes Indian Ocean Geopoetics |
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Parmi les artistes dont les travaux font partie du grand courant géopoétique, Ka.Ty Deslandes occupe une place particulière. |
Among the artists whose work is part of the great geopoetic movement, Ka.Ty Deslandes occupies a rather special position. A Westerner (she was born near Paris) and White (mousoungou, as they say on Mayotte), she is well acquainted with Oriental spirituality in general, and Indian spirituality in particular. She knows that in India, poetry, and by the same token, plastic art, is yoga. That is why Art Yoga was the title she gave to her first series of works (1971-1980), in which a conception of art derived both from Indian spirituality (think of Ajit Mookerjee’s Art Yoga, with its shri-yantra diagrams and its mandalas) and the theories of Western artists such as Kandinsky (On the Spiritual in Art) or Klee (Theory of Modern Art) came to the fore. In addition, Ka.Ty Deslandes has physical knowledge of the Great Ocean. On a mission from the French Foreign Office to encourage «the development of a contemporary Melanesian art, she lived on Vanuatu from 1984 to 1986, frequenting islands such as Vaté, Tana, Mallicolo… As from 1987, she spent six years on Mayotte, working from a studio in the bush overlooking the Bay of Boueni, and sailing to Anjouan, the Grande Comore, Mohéli and Madagascar. In 1994, she set up her workshop on the island of Reunion. During all those oceanic years, Ka.Ty Deslandes brought a variety of elements into her art and went through several phases. If the basic inspiration remains «yogic» (the search for unity and harmony), she could not avoid vicissitudes, turbulence and perturbation. All this is reflected in the titles of her work. After Art Yoga came, from 1981 to 1983, Failles (Chasms), the slide-shows «Fantasmes africains» (African Fantasia), «Chant des failles» (Song of the Chasms) and «Terres à rejoindre» (Landfalls.) From 1984 to 1998, she worked at Noir-Ethno-Mythique (Black-Ethno-Mythic). From 1984 to 1985, it was Terres d’Océanie (Ocean Lands). From 1987 to 1993, Métissage (Mixing), and from 1994 to 1999, D’Îles et d’amour (Of Islands and Love). In all these series, while they are strongly marked by individual energy and personal unrest, can be seen certain topical themes as well as more or less explicit references to this or that traditional context (Kanak, Australian, African) which could at times come across in anthropomorphic terms. But what is paramount in Ka.Ty Deslandes’ work are the elements: water, earth, air, fire, accompanied by the parameters of sensitive space (light, colour). And her primary source is the ocean itself. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud refers to what he calls «the oceanic feeling» (das ozeanische Gefühl). «At the beginning» he writes, «the self includes everything. Later on, it excludes the exterior world. And the result is that our present sense of the self is no more than the curtailed residue of a feeling of much greater extent, in fact so extended it embraced the whole world, and corresponded to a more intimate union between the self and the environment.» This notion, which with Freud turns up only in the by going, is developed at length by Sandor Ferenczi in Thalassa. In this study, Ferenczi goes from psychoanalysis to biology, from the discontement with civilization (for Freud, inevitable) to a process of oceanization. Discovering a «biological subconscious», a «depth biology», Ferenczi feels that he is landing «on the shores of a new science». One thinks also in this context of the «open system» theory, according to which the deep language of the human being is not fundamentally different from the language of things, the language of the universe. With those bio-psycho-cosmic references, we’re right at the centre of Ka.Ty Deslandes’ artistic activity. The young child who, in a garden near Paris, observed nature (leaves, flowers, tree-bark, stones…) and took delight in its rhythms (night and day, season after season), who widened the scope of her first sensations on the banks of the Loire and the Mayenne rivers and on the shores of the Atlantic ocean, never lost or forgot an iota of her early ecstasies and investigations. Her later experiences in the Pacific and Indian oceans simply gave them more amplitude and exactitude. There has been constant evolution. If the general context of Ka.Ty Deslandes’ art is the ocean, there exists within this general space a specific place to which she is particularly attracted: the shore. On our territories often built-up to excess, out there on the edge, there is a space free, at least on principle, of building and construction. There, the «being» of the human being can space itself out. There, it faces an open expanse, one foot still in the human context, the other in a non-human, more-than-human context. Given all this, the shore is an excellent place for meditation. That’s why an old Celtic text says that «the shore has always been a special place for the poets». On the shores of the world she has frequented, be it those of the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian oceans, Ka.Ty Deslandes has always practised the primary act of gathering, collecting. She gathers corals, pebbles, seaweeds, pumice stone, pieces of lava. And it’s these collected elements, allied to colour (oil, acrylic, pastel), on surfaces of wood or rough jute canvas, that form the matter of her art. «Art brut», «Informal art», «Arte povera», some will say, more eager to fit works of art into some established category than to see them in their open space, out more to classify than to contemplate. No, this is geopoetic art. What makes art geopoetic and not just «brut», informal, or «poor», is a dimension — a dimension of the mind. What counts in painting, said Klee, is the poetry. And the poetry in question is a world-poetry. From her very first steps in art, at the age of eleven, Ka.Ty Deslandes was keen, in her own words, to «make worlds». If she inherited from her mother the capacity to observe nature, to see the world at work, from her father, a craftsman carpenter, she inherited manual and inventive skills. With the series Entre vagues et rivages (Between Wave and Shore), work done between 2000 and 2003, which comprises large pieces on jute, small and medium pieces composed of materials gathered on the shore, along with sculptural pieces and installations, this art reaches its plenitude. With a radical simplification has come an amplification. No thematic messages here, no mythical figures, no symbolism. But things, a selection of things, disposed and composed — and that dimension I choose (so as not to encumber the meditative space with connotations) to call neither «spiritual», nor «cosmic», but, as I said above, geopoetic. Looking at «Mtsanga Baharini» (beach), «Cap Lahoussaye», «Le souffleur» (Blowhole), «Cap Méchant» «L’Hermitage», «Tonga soa», «Fenêtre bleue» (Blue window), «Rivages» (Shores), «La mer la nuit» (The Sea at night), «Par 30 nœuds» (30 Knots), «Banc de sable» (Sandbank), «Le récif» (Reef), «Enedsa» I say to myself that, despite all the noise and the fury, despite the invasion, the colonisation of minds by short sighted power-systems and sheer stupidity, it is still possible to live a geopoetic life and create an art adequate to the greatness of the world, in correspondence with the ample movement of the ocean, expressive of the full extent of desire. |
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Rencontre avec K. White Juin 1999 |
Kenneth WHITE |
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Poète, écrivain, Fondateur de l’Institut international de géopoétique. |
Poet, writer, Founder of the International Institute of Geopoetics |
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Les nourritures terrestres "Il ne suffit pas de dire que les sables des plages sont doux; je veux que mes piedsnus le sentent… Toute connaissance que n'a pas précédée une sensation m'est inutile. Je n'ai rien vu de doucement beau dans ce monde, sans désirer que toute ma tendresse le touche." André Gide |
Tristes Tropiques "…J'aime errer sur la grève délaissée par la marée et suivre aux contours d'une côte abrupte l'itinéraire qu'elle impose, en ramassant des cailloux percés, des coquillages dont l'usure a reformé la géométrie, ou des racines de roseaux figurant des chimères, et me faire un musée de tous ces débris: pour un bref instant, il ne cède en rien à ceux ou l'on a assemblé des chefs d'oeuvre; ces dernier proviennent d'ailleurs d'un travail qui - pour avoir son siège dans l'esprit et non au dehors - n'est peut être pas fondamentalement différent de ce à quoi la nature se complait." Claude Lévi-Strauss |
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Peintures d'Océan "De ces regards croisés, enrichis de cultures différentes pourra, avec le temps, se dessiner un langage, non pas aux marges de l'Art mais en son sein. L'Art, une fois compris, est sans bornes, seuls l'artiste ou les passants sont bornés ou pas. Le propos, ne contient aucune idée préconçue, aucune dissidence autre que plastique. La démarche artistique n'est ni en continuité, ni en rupture avec l'histoire de l'art des civilisations. Elle n'est que l'aboutissement d'une nécéssité personnelle, un regard autre, esthétique et existentiel, portée sur une nature oubliée mais d'une richesse plastique insoupçonnée. Un questionnement qui cherche à proposer un autre discours sur l'oeuvre, l'art et l'artiste, comme celui proposé par Dubuffet avec l'Art Brut. Ainsi pourra se définir cet Art Résiduel, à la croisée des chemins entre une démarche artistique première mais associant l'archéologie, l'ethnographie, l'écologie ainsi que la philosophie, le tout ficelé par beaucoup de souvenir, d'émotions maîtrisées et par un inlassable travail de remise en cause. Nicolas Roy |