ART-PREVIEW:Pascal Convert-Three Trees
Pascal Convert is an artist working in sculpture, installation and video, a documentary filmmaker and a writer. The topics of memory and forgetting are central to his work. He explores personal, political and aesthetic questions through his use of materials such as glass and wax, which evoke time, light and the lingering after-effects of the past.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Eric Dupont Archive
A birch tree of the Crematorium V of Auschwitz-Birkenau, an atomized cherry tree of Hiroshima, stone trees of life on the khachkars of the Armenian cemetery of Julfa are the protagonists of Pascal Convert’s solo exhibition “Three Trees” at Galerie Eric Dupont. In front of this trilogy, through familial, cultural and historical archaeology, a fragile glance tries to imagine what can survive destruction in our recent history: in 1941, with the concentration and annihilation of the Jews of Europe; in 1945, with the Allied Victory and first atomic bomb on Hiroshima; in 2006, with the final destruction of three thousand khachkars of the old cemetery of Julfa, the Armenian territory annexed by Azerbaijan. The Barks, shreds torn from a birch tree by Georges Didi-Huberman on the outskirts of the Crematorium V where his grandparents and hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated, draw the shadow of hands in pain and sorrow. Barks of barks, the photographic “crystallization” of these “greyish, friable, almost ashen” barks by Pascal Convert transforms these objects, which had become similar to graphite powder, into glass brilliant as a diamond. Barked Bark of the imprint of the cherry tree atomized on August 6, 1945 in the garden of the Seiju-Ji temple in Hiroshima: the relic meticulously painted, layer after layer, day after day, by a Japanese lacquer master, is “converted by this lacquer into an extraordinary black and glossy sculpture”. “having told Pascal Convert a few years ago the story of these Far Eastern monks who build their own holiness on an essentially mineral and sculptural model: they end up eating only tea, soil and stones. They die dried up in the Buddha’s position, if possible with the famous smile on their faces. They remain still, uncorrupted, in a fold of the mountain. When the villagers discover the body, it is carried in procession to a temple where it is entirely lacquered in black” recalls Georges Didi-Huberman* when he comments this sculpture. Stone bark: even by making a rubbing of the khatchkars saved from the destruction of the Julfa cemetery, the irrevocable nature of the destruction cannot be cancelled, as the event took place. Of hundreds of 8th to 18th Century stones carved in bas-relief and flat-plane, that were studied by Jurgis Baltrusaitis and that evoke the famous illuminated manuscript of Kells through their interlacing, only debris remain, swallowed up in the shadow of the Aras River on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan. “For the Armenian church, the decorated cross or simply the cross with wings appears as a blossom cross, which means it symbolizes the tree of life, the victory of life over death, eternity and eternal blossoming”. In 2002 Pascal Convert received a commission from the French state to create a monument to the hostages and French Resistance fighters shot at Mont Valérien between 1941 and 1944. The “Mémorial de la France combattante” is an important site for commemorating the French Resistance during World War II, with a ceremony attended by the president of France held on 18 June each year. However, there was no monument to those shot at Mont Valerien, since many were foreign, Communist or Jewish. Convert made a documentary film, “Mont Valérien, aux noms des fusillés” (2003). The film tells the story of the Mont Valérien monument and the résistants whom it honors. Convert contrasts the Mont Valérien of the Gaullist ceremonies, exalting the FFI resistance, and the place where the firing squads executed their victims. The film portrays the résistants in humanistic terms, as individuals who may be emulated but are not utterly different from other people. In 2007 Convert published a historical biography of Joseph Epstein (“Colonel Gilles”), a leader of the Franc Tireurs Partisans (FTP) in the Île-de-France who was shot at Mont Valérien in 1944. During his research he made a fourth crystal sculpture named “Le temps scellé” and a documentary film “Joseph Epstein, bon pour la légende”.
*Georges Didi-Huberman is a French art historian whose research spans the visual arts, the historiography of art, psychoanalysis, the human sciences, and philosophy. He studied art history and philosophy at the Université de Lyon and received his doctoral degree at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris in 1981 under the supervision of Louis Marin.
Info: Galerie Eric Dupont, 138 Rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 5/10-23/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.eric-dupont.com
