Pierrette Bloch

Born in 1928 in Paris (FR). Died in 2017 in Paris (FR)

  

Sculpture de crin, BS.644

1999
Horsehair attached and knotted on nylon thread
Width : 365 cm
Purchased in: 2010

Discours & circonstances
Sans titre
Sculpture de crin, BS.644

“I like tools that can make lines.
I know lines. I frequent them, their lack of conclusion, their lack of an ending, their returns, their accidents, their apparent speed, their tenacious duration, their persistence, their urgency.” ⁰

Since 1979, Pierrette Bloch has been using horsehair mesh in her sculptures, but it was only in 1982 that this gesture has found its most enduring and most radical, definitive, recurring form in the line. The long, thin black horsehair is mounted on an invisible nylon thread stretched a few millimeters from the surface of the white wall. The shadow projected on the wall duplicates the threads thus creating the impression of volume. Since 1992, Bloch’s work, which is both a form and an object, has been closely linked with Bloch’s linear compositions of ink dots on paper. These are the only works elaborated as an infinite series by the artist. Points, lines, and loops repeated like a litany of a work produced in the artist’s atelier. Formalism reduced to its simplest expression which would risk indefatigably reproducing the same object if it weren’t Art: the fruit of intransigent conceptual rigor and of poetic aesthetic asceticism.

Ligne de crin is an engagement with art that develops an autonomous discourse and that does not adopt representations of the world in which we live. It is an abstract work in its most absolute quest, a Romantic, obsessive work, a “Penelope syndrome” ¹ transfigured into Art.

Horsehair sculpture ² is both material and immaterial, a Dionysian and Saturnine dynamism. Seen on the scale of the wall, it appears as a distant, truncated horizon—as a thin, barely visible, black slit. If one stands at the starting point of the Blochian line, it draws the viewer in. The eye is a sort of “reader head” which slides from left to right and back as if scanning inexpressible sheet music written for it alone. The “nearly nothing,” a “beginning and an end” engendered at a distant viewing point, have become obsolete. The nature of the line turns out to be “always other.” One loses the thread when one enters the body of the work. One follows with one’s gaze the emergence of the horsehair which resists even the minimal, a-priori narrative. It’s a barely seen detail which, when observed, speaks loud and clear. The detail functions as an irreducible, eccentric accessory which transforms or sublimates everything through shifts in visibility/legibility. The concept of the line is redefined by a substance which is otherwise more poetic than the mere rectitude of a trace. The experience of the material leaves us speechless. “I was looking for a trace. It was the entrance into a forest, an increasingly intimate network where I collected footsteps and detours. To the point of vertigo, I kept unwinding a thread in a labyrinth I never left. I thought I found a thread, but I found memories.” ³
Each time, the exploits of the detail prove to be each time alike and different, as a generous and playful figure of style: the plasticity of the intertwined horsehair, the reminiscence of the meshes, the resistance of the fibers, the ornamentation of the loops, the rhythms of the fabric pills, the all-over linearity, the tightening of the threads, the formless geometry, the unbridled tangle, the release of knots, the wild twists, the muted eroticism of interlaced strands… We are positioned at the very distance where the artist is placed when composing her work, the moment of the work-in-itself: “The disorder I would like to talk about is like a non-choice where I bury myself, where I withdraw in order to begin… I do not name these things, I do not see them. And then it comes together, awakens me, and surprises me: a rhythm, a cadence, a form. An adventure begins.” ⁴

luc jeand’heur

_{0 : Pierrette Bloch, Ligne, May 10, 2002, extracted from Pierrette Bloch, Centre Pompidou exhibition catalogue (Centre Pompidou, 2002).}

_{1 : Penelope syndrome manifests itself in people who, whether willingly or not, or consciously or not, undo their own work.}

_{2 : A Ligne de crin constitutes a large part of the plastic language particular to Pierrette Bloch, and yet it’s neither a drawing nor writing but belongs more to the order of bas-relief, to the plastic vocabulary of sculpture.}

_{3 : Pierrette Bloch, Mailles et mailles de crin: mémoires, 1982.}

_{4 : Pierrette Bloch, “L’ordre et le désordre,” 1998/2002, excerpt from Pierrette Bloch, Centre Pompidou exhibition catalogue (Centre Pompidou, 2002).}

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