Studio Encounter with Guillaume Treppoz
Your latest series of high reliefs speaks to us of Christs and crucifixions, yet crucifixions that exclude any representation of the cross… Here, the cross is evoked only through the material intrinsic to it: wood. And more than ever, wood is omnipresent in this ongoing body of work. With the rigid, orthogonal form of this instrument of torture thus removed, the God-man acquires a wonderfully uplifting weightlessness. He seems to float among the branches; he is the spirit of the trees, the master of the forest. At times, he lies horizontally, as in one of the works from this singular Way of the Cross without a Cross.
“The gift of living has passed into the flowers,” wrote Valéry in The Graveyard by the Sea. I dare to paraphrase the great man by saying that, for your Christs, the gift of dying has passed into the branches.
Animism lies in wait for us at the edge of these woods where the blood god spreads through the sap of its innumerable ramifications.
What we are dealing with here is indeed rocaille, in this profusion of vegetation, rocaille reminiscent of our most exuberant seashells. To achieve this, for the magic of the Baroque to take effect, you had to pass through earth, through mother clay, the material that captures, down to the micron, the imprint of our primal emotions. Into this earthen crucible, this matrix in which the slightest pressure is inscribed in negative, you poured the viscous cement, a flow of lava that petrifies the dead branches of our primordial anxiety.
Guillaume Treppoz
(November 2019)