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2023 Art Season
Dining room, Château

A. Pascal Convert

"Vestigium"

published at 30/01/2023

Spirituality, memory and meaning are at the heart of Pascal Convert’s body of work, which is both mysterious and profound. His work focuses essentially on imprint and the recusal of oblivion. He maintains his own special connections with everything that has disappeared, objects and living beings alike, and often makes use of crystallisation. Molten glass is poured onto objects and gradually attacks the matter of books or the wood of sculptures, as if it were a form of transubstantiation, a special kind of alchemy that retains the soul of the text involved.

Hence, La cristallisation au livre perdu (Crystallisation of the Lost Book) consists of destroying a book and its contents with molten glass, which gradually replaces the book. The result is a phantasmal object, a crystallised work, bearer of vitrified memory. The original book’s carbonised remnants remain in the heart of the sculpture, evoking countless book burnings ordered by totalitarian powers since antiquity. Pascal Convert has installed his fire-crystallised books in the de Broglies’ library in Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire, which was destroyed by fire in 1957, as a fair return for the burned works it once contained.

Imprints and traces are omnipresent themes in his work, connected with the themes of war, destruction and resistance. In the Dining Room and Historic Grounds, the artist presents his Souches (Ceux de 14 / Those of 14), tree stumps from the Verdun battlefield, some coated in Indian ink and others vitrified. Overwhelming and bursting with superimposed memories, they leave a powerful imprint on the mind.

In 2023, Pascal Convert will be adding a sensational installation to the Château’s collection, composed of forty plaster candelabras arranged on a sheet of black glass exactly the same size as the Dining Room table top. Emerging from the depths of a bottomless lake, the forest of candelabras draws up like a squadron deprived of light. As is his habit, the artist summons up highly symbolic images.

VESTIGIUM
“The day has hardly started to close when night hastens to fall between Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire’s walls. Here, evening’s light descends more quickly than anywhere else, the great trees in the grounds conceal the setting sun that sinks in ruins behind the intersecting stained-glass windows, tinting the books on the library’s shelves red one last time.
The light dies slowly until the doors are closed and the great candlesticks are set on the Dining Room’s huge table, on which a black mirror covers the white tablecloth that usually acts as its wedding gown.
Fashioned from immaculate white gypsum, the candlesticks have no fear of the slow death of the wax candles writhing with pain in the flame.
Lunar forms, parts of which spin from one curve to another, from one side to another, in a dual ascending/descending movement of their structure, between being and nonbeing, the remnants of bygone times, they return for a dinner we know nothing of except that it has taken place.
The only traces of a party or a drama, they turn in the white solitude of the incompleteness we attribute to plaster objects. Real presences of the absent objects whose inhabited designs they have become, they form a changing round in which there is neither night nor day.
Voices are stilled, arms are crossed as if the beholders wished to keep their distance; here and there hands touch. Everyone focuses on the clarity become crystalline. Objects that have become immortal, the candlesticks have something invisible hidden within them: absence. 
In this funerary atmosphere, the imagination roams among the remnants of now far-off lives. I see you once again; I hear your capricious laughter, your angry tears; once we believed in happiness, far from the curfew’s black nights.” Pascal Convert

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Pascal CONVERT
FRANCE
 
 
The son of an artist, Pascal Convert was born in 1957 in Mont-de-Marsan. He is a visual artist, writer and director, and defines his work as the archaeology of architecture, childhood, history, the body and time. He uses materials such as glass and wax to evoke the passage of time, light and the lasting effects of the past. In 1987, while he was living in Bordeaux, he covered the wooden panelling in one room of his apartment with plate glass, which formed the first in his series entitled Appartement de l’artiste. In 1989 and 1990 he was resident at the Villa Médicis in Rome, and in 1992 his first major solo exhibition was held at the CAPC (Contemporary Art Museum) in Bordeaux.
In 1997 he was invited by the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman to take part in the L’Empreinte exhibition at the Centre Pompidou alongside Giuseppe Penone, Man Ray, Alain Fleischer and others. Georges Didi-Huberman would go on to write several books about Convert’s work (published by Éditions de Minuit) and include him in numerous exhibitions.
In 2002, he unveiled his memorial to resistance fighters and hostages, the Monument à la mémoire des résistants et otages fusillés au Mont Valérien entre 1941 et 1944 (Mémorial de la France combattante, Suresnes). Opposite the chapel where they were held before they were taken to the place of execution, Pascal Convert erected a 2.7m x 2.18m bronze bell engraved with the names of those who were killed. In 2003, as a continuation of this work, he made a documentary about the victims, Mont Valérien, aux noms des fusillés.
In 2007 his exhibition Lamento at Mudam in Luxembourg featured wax sculptures inspired by iconic press photos: La Pietà du Kosovo (1999-2000), based on a photo taken by Georges Mérillon, La Madone de Bentalha (2001-2002), based on a photo taken by Hocine Zaourar, and La Mort de Mohamed Al Dura (2002-2003), based on stills from a video by Talal Abou Rahmed. These sculptures have been widely exhibited at the United Nations, in Montreal, in Switzerland and in Italy. In the same year, he published a biography of Joseph Epstein, leader of the communist resistance in Paris, who was shot at Mont Valérien in 1944.
In 2008, he completed a set of stained glass windows for the abbey church of Saint Gildas des Bois (Loire-Atlantique). He then exhibited a huge crystal sculpture Le Temps scellé: Joseph Epstein et son fils, in the Force de l’Art exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2009. After four years of work, he published Raymond Aubrac: résister, reconstruire, transmettre (Seuil, 2011), and made two documentary films about this leader of the French Resistance. Two years later the autobiographical story La Constellation du Lion (Grasset) was published. In 2014, he took part in the Busan Biennale in South Korea and the group exhibition La Guerre qui vient n’est pas la première: 1914-2014 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in Italy.
The highlight of the year 2016 was an invitation from the French ambassador to Afghanistan to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban. Convert mounted an expedition in association with Iconem, an organisation that specialises in conflict zone archaeology. Using drones, he scanned the whole of the cliff face in Bamiyan to produce images that are now freely available to the global scientific community. Using a high-resolution camera, he made a “photographic impression” of the place where the monumental sculptures were carved about 1,600 years ago.
In 2019, the Éric Dupont Gallery dedicated a solo exhibition entitled Trois arbres to his work. Working with birch bark from Crematorium V at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a nuked cherry tree from Hiroshima, and the stone tree of life carvings found on Armenian khachkars, Pascal Convert used an archaeological investigation of family, culture and history to try to re-imagine that which has survived the destruction of our recent history.
He created Memento Marengo in 2021 to mark the bicentenary of Napoleon I’s death. In Antiquity, Herodotus wrote of the burials of horsemen with their steeds, while in some parts of Asia, a similar custom endured up to the 20th century, with graves in which the deceased horseman was escorted by hanged horses. Pascal Convert’s body of work renews this ancient rite and gets Marengo’s skeleton (based on photogrammetric capture of the original skeleton) hovering beneath Les Invalides’ Dome, so creating a contemporary memento mori.
 

Last year, on the invitation of Voyage à Nantes, the artist produced a permanent artwork, Miroirs des Temps, for the Miséricorde cemetery, the last resting place of the region’s great families’ deceased. A series of glass bas-reliefs, created in collaboration with the master glassmaker Olivier Juteau, is distributed in the oldest part of the necropolis, which is marked by particularly dense vegetation. Each of the ghostly animals in question follows the visitor’s gaze with mute but moving persistence.

PASCAL CONVERT. "VESTIGIUM".

Complete biography

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