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44
Les Prairies's artists
JOHN DIVOLA
Vandalism, 1974. Courtesy galery Laura Bartlett, London.
éTIENNE-MARTIN
French sculptor Étienne-Martin, who worked in the tradition of
Brancusi, was also influenced by Marcel Duchamp. He worked
with bronze, or fabric and rubber, and had a predilection for
wood. He maintained that "the interior determines form". The
"interior" could be an inner life or a family home, just as it
could be the nature of a piece of wood that already contained
the form. This spiritual attitude towards materials animated
his work and necessarily entailed a kind of introspection that
could be looked on as an initiatory journey deep into personal
history. In the 1950s, delving back into early memories,
especially of his childhood home in Loriol in South-East
France, he began making Demeures, a series of architectural
sculptures. These pieces along with his famous Manteau
en tissue, belong to what might be called nostalgic art. La
Marelle (hopscotch) is an assemblythat uses the ground plan
of the Loriol house. The graphics are basic shapes (sun, circle,
rectangle, heart), numbers and inscriptions. It is part of the
Abécédaire (Alphabet Primer). "The Abécédaire met a crucially
important need, which was to connect various different things
together, to find a link between these figures. The Abécédaire
is a chronological route from the closed and secret world of the
original alcove out to the terrace, which is open to the outside
world. It is also a kind of game of goose" (Etienne-Martin). This
original art, which transforms biography into universal artistic
experience, transcends all opposition between modern and
archaic, figurative and abstraction.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1913 in Loriol (France), died in 1995.
A major photographer on the California art scene, John
Divola began his career in the 1970s with the series
San Fernando Valley (1971-1973), which documented the
life of the inhabitants, as well as the architecture, of a
depressed Los Angeles suburb. The series Vandalism,
executed between 1974 and 1975, was a founding work
in his conceptual vocabulary. He took black and white
photographs of the interiors of abandoned houses, after
first reworking the spaces – for the most part with silver
aerosol paint or by moving various objects. His first ideas
for this series came while he was developing photos of
silver-grey gas bottles. The link between the silver of the
photographic paper and the colour of the bottles gave him
the idea of extending the effects of the photo and the flash
to this colour. Divola started taking paint aerosols into
abandoned houses in Los Angeles and painting at random
the walls, ceilings, floors and various objects he found
there. The three-dimensional space of these interiors is
flattened by the two-dimensional pictorial pattern that
comes to the surface of the image. Vandalism established
a conceptual link between painting and photography in a
direct line with Californian artists like Ed Ruscha.
F. O. tr. J.H.
Born in 1949 in Los Angeles (United States), where he
lives and works.
La Marelle, 1963. Collection Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain
de Strasbourg. Photography : M. Bertola. © Adagp, Paris 2012.