Forms emerge and take their places. Strategic elements, pieces on a chessboard ? Signs ready to be endowed with meaning ? Objects just a touch unfit or use ? The forms content themselves with having dawned at the surface, and stay there, regulary arranged on the wall, calm and vaguely threatening. As if at any moment, the selected pieces, these spare parts detached from a greater whole, could find their places in a new, abruptly revealed configuration within some mysterious and awe-inspiring machine : the absolute scuplture, or rather the general scuplture. Not the unique object, the erected, monumental object, radically irreductible to the non-sculpted universe, but its diametrical opposite : an indeterminate number of scattered objects with arbitrarily irregular geometric shapes that suffice to mark as sculpture the whole of the unmarked world.`
At times, the reliefs seem to hesitate midway, hovering on the brink of turning definitively into sculptures, radiating more volume than contact with their support and separating from the wall. And thus they appear to be waiting. At times, the reliefs penetrate more deeply into three-dimensional space and, facing all sides, they let themselves be approached, all the while remaining impregnable, invulnerable and seemingly indestructible because they are already in the aftermath of all possible destruction. Yet the materials are not what they seem, for these are fake shields and fake armours skillfully stretched across armatures of wood. Polished and shiny outer shells covering soft glossless skeletons. A whole painstaking effort of appearances : decoys, intimidation effects and outer fittings more akin to the animal than to the mineral world. The sign of hardness only stands out as a sign insofar as hardness is really softness in disguise. Subtle reserve of the senses, subtle refuge of emotion, subtle smiling of thought at the massiveness of matter, subtle counterfeit more costly than all the ostentasious strenght of the strongly forged and manufactured alloys. Counterpoising and conterbalancing sculpture that has already made it to the top, that is rich, heavy and sure of its weight and of its price. Here, the forms that appear are sustained and maintained by the desire for form alone.
At times, desire hesitates. As proof : here they are, losing their sharp edge. Forms and volumes are reduced to their planes, plans, projects, and projection ; luminous photographic traces of their outlines and edges on a flat sensitized surface. In a flash, form has stripped off its clothing and appears naked, reduced to its formula, its basic lines, its minimal Identi-Kit portrait. Here are the lines, lying flat , contained in the thickness of a sheet of paper ; a family of forms ready to turn into a volume, but still at a matrix state : line as trace and trace as mold. Everything has taken place and everything is still in the planning stage. Everything hesitates. At times, the trace of the volume that has been flattened onto a plane, even seems to create a slight dent in the surface : an imperceptible hollowness, a highly discreet level below zero. We would have to touch it to be sure, but as with all drawings and photos, it surface is protected by glass and surrounded by a deceptively massive frame.
At times, forms, which are represented flat, figure of the vibration of light, its analysis, its reading. Then colours emerge, the colours of the spector, with all the appearance of having been scientifically proportioned and faultlessly applied by an automaton. But this is just another decoy, just another illusion. Everything is done by hand using gouache. Symbols and representations of contemporary physics made with a pupil's paintbrushes and tubes of colour. The modesty of virtuosity and, when taken this far, the virtuosity of modesty.
The reason that Henri Foucault's work up ‘till now has not been seen more often is that it makes the eye hesitate -a rare quality indeed today. Being a poor observer, I tend to try to gain forgiveness (including from myself) for my blameworthy inattentiveness by being indulgent toward works that I happen to see. By and large, I regard the work of others as fairly good and even rather better than my own. But whenever my eyes lingers, almost everything becomes weak and pointless. There is but a step from being good to being good for nothing. Unless, that is, I am arrested by the very thing I see. Henri Foucault cultivates such a reserved (even modest) aesthetic approach, even in terms of his social behavior, that a whole set of circumstances were necessary to bring me to his work. But once circumstances had done their job and this poor observer has followed the guide as if by routine, and with the aforementioned tendencies toward indulgence in movement punctuated by severity when lingering, I had to admit that, faced with these « something elses » by Henri Foucault, I too would have to invent something else.
Translated by Gila Walker
Alain Fleischer