POLLÈS Centauresque
Bronze with silver patina
Réf. : 6159c
DIMENSIONS :
– 170 x 170 x 98 cm
PRICE : Please, contact the gallery
Created in 2007, Cast Pollès 2011
Signed et numbered
The sculptor Pollès takes over the Place de l’Eglise in Megève through five monumental works presented in collaboration with the Galerie de SOUZY. This open-air exhibition celebrates the talent of an authentic artist, perpetuating the tradition of the great masters of the 20th century.
CONTACT
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Equine pleasure to female desire
Since the Princes of time immemorial, the equestrian statue has iIlustrated a genre in sculpture that has always attempted the same thing: to represent a centaur, The classics clearly show the horse and the rider, and riding experts can immediately spot from the position of the rider’s legs, ankles, calves, or seat whether one is looking at an authentic rider or a sandbag plumped on the rump of some hack. The King must, naturally, ride weil, but the artist first and foremost shows his majesty, not his skill at being at one with his mount. The condottiere Colleoni also knew how to ride, it was his education, his profession too, but his statue above all shows his bravery, his strength, his determination, and the warlike qualities of this high-flyingiy intellectual mercenary. But how to represent a modern centaur after the aesthetic revolution of the 20 th century?
Pollès sets himself the same challenge as a Renaissance artist, as all his sculpting work shows: he is classical, even if he at the same time works as a contemporary of his postmodern era. The son of Michelangelo and Boccioni. The Renaissance artist he is sculpts the same matter, using identical techniques, and similar forging tricks handed down from Vulcan. The same mystery of the forge, the same magic of the fire, the same transfiguration of raw ores into forms and volumes imagined in his steel soul.
Bronze casting in Pollès’ studio transforms the spectator into a contemporary of the heroes of Boccaccio’s The Decameron. The smells, the sounds, the sputtering, the colours of the materials in fusion (cherry red speckling its black eye), its rapid oxidization, the bronzes inoffensive aspect just a few moments later when, a still dangerous beast, it could reduce the hand that approaches it to cinders, all this demonstrates a master of the trade at work, an artisan bending his skills to his will with a steady hand.
The artist proposes original forms. Reality has no longer been faithfully represented for a long time now and, thankfully, masters of the horse no longer have their say in judging the aesthetic qualities of an equestrian statue: theoretically, we can dispense with evoking anatomy to determine whether something is beautiful because resemblant. Sculpture no longer has to be resemblant te be beautiful. Moreover, it doesn’t have to aim te be primarily beautiful either. Which doesn’t stop it from being so in the second instance. For, the aesthetic revolutions of the 20th century assign sculpture another task today: to propose original forms in a universe in which many have already been shown.
Cubism caused major repercussions and did so well beyond the realm of painting. On the canvas, theses revolutionaries painted like sculptors unfolding their volumes to produce flat surfaces. The cubist smoothes out forms, overlooking none: the slightest fold around which a volume is organised thus becomes a line dividing planes. We are all familiar with Juan Gris’ paintings, which iilustmate this magic at work. Lines in fiattened volumes. Surrealism opened the door to the oneiric. The real’s significance comes firstly from what it arouses and creates in the artist then the viewer.
Landscapes or dream forms, vast expanses stemming from hallucinations, geographic or geological zones in the pith of madness, lands of mescaline and neurosis, baroque universes of psychoses, to myths more real than reality. Surrealism produced very little in the way of sculpture because literature and painting better conveyed the bents of the imagination than the constraints of a three-dimensional universe. Better a Yupik fetish or Dogon mask, or Rapa Nui’s moai statues, or a menhir from the past than a monumental surrealist sculpture of it time…
Futurism magnified speed, energy, the forces at play in the real. It worshipped movement, its decomposition, its deconstruction. Influenced by Bergson, it sought to resolve the mystery of Zeno’s arrow and showed that movement can be reduced to a sum of immobilities and that, strangely, when depicted, this sum, like chronophotography, produced a continuum generating aesthetic forms. A kind of still shot of Heraclitus flowing river One and Multiple at the same time captured in all its ontological dimensions simultaneously.
Pollès is not cubist, surrealist, or futurist, but he preserves, integrates and surpasses these three forces of the by-gone 20th century. The artisan (or the artist) contemporaneous with Colleoni is equaily the artist (or artisan) of his time, and into his crucible he throws a series of images, impressions, emotions from the previous century to forge a style in which two traits of his character cohabit: force, violence, brutality and gentleness, tenderness. In other words, to use the terms of the trade: lines and curves. A magnificent counterpoint capable of producing oxymoronic volumes!
Lines in the curves, or curves in the lines; what a strange configuration! And an interesting aesthetic collision. Yet the temperament of Pollès’ character lies in the grammar of these prioritized forms. Trenchant, acute, sharp, and, at the same time, round, voluptuous, dense, voluminous. And also the play on these two registers: sharpness where one expects the contrary, as is the case with the horse’s head, or rather its face, unscathed by roundness, the lines of a billhook…
An eagle’s face for a horse that thus becomes a hippogriff — a sonorous blend of bird claw and horse. Claw and beak. But the tip of the ear forms a line which, from the top of the neck to the bottom of the breast, majestically depicts the horse sporting a kind of prow capable of breaking the ices of the wind, air or war. A powerful breast, a combat horse, a horse of power, an assault horse, a proud horse, the left fore peoised taught like a leg, and this leg shaped like a shell.
And then, and then, on closer observation, the quadruped turns out to be a biped whose balance is achieved through the foot of the rider… No respect for anatomy in this adventure, no anterior and posterior limbs, but this strange assemblage that wonderfully evokes the centaur. The ensemble rests on this magical tripod: animal and human blended, merged, three legs of the same anatomical style without the horse sporting a human limb or the woman an equine fore.
The same process is at play with the rumps: the horse’s could be the that of the woman. A line producing the fold around which the buttocks are distributed, and a movement pulling the ensemble upwards, in the manner of the rut postures that excite, the libidinous animal that is the mammal- human or not.
A pair of buttocks, one thinks, but here, in the sculpture, there are two pairs, or,in other words, four round, plump cheeks. A multiplication of voluptuous occasions. The woman’s stomach sensually conjoins the neck. The two fieshes, the two matters, the woman’s skin, the horse’s hide, are smoothed by the bronze. The contact between the two bodies traces a line, a hollow, a line drawn in intermingling matters. The horse’s kind of pride seems to come from the satisfaction it might well feel from the presence of this woman’s naked body, her rump raised to signify to the quadruple mammal that, through sensuality, voluptuousness, the pleasure of carnal contacts, it belongs to her world of biped mammals. Equine pleasure to female desire – or female pleasure te equine desire…
The horse’s face – if not to say its head, the animal becoming so human on contact with the femmine – echoes that of the woman. A face of steel, the profile of a warrior woman, a heroine escaped from a Picasso painting riding and parading, as if in a circus, arms raised and spread, the elbows forming two points and a new triangle with the top of the bust, which is also shell- shaped. lts tip brings to mind the tip of a breast. The three points of the hoofs/feet and the three points of the elbows/breast echo one another and form a counterpoint of a triangular surface: one on the ground, assuring the equilibrium of the ensemble; the other in the air, offering a geometric figure of voluptuousness in space.
The two triangulations assure the form of a pyramid in which is inscribed the female centaur. And, as always with the pyramid, the broad base rests on the ground and guarantees steadiness, force and telluric power; it designates a rooting, in spite of the three points touching the ground whose finesse of rerniniscent cf bird claws. ut cenveys the immanent inscription, at the same time that the ramefacticn cf matter at the top speaks aspiration towards the sky, the firmament and its transcendence.
This horse that is a bull with a bird’s beak ridden by a woman who is a steel soldier produces a female centaur; this two-legged quadruped ridden by a breastless woman is a female stallion or a male mare. This pyramid is a hymn to numbers – three legs, two of which are hoofs, or four hoofs, two of which are legs; three points, one of which is a nipple, two rumps for four buttocks; this libidinous monster is composed of a testicle-less mount and a female rider without breasts, the vulva invisible, dissimulated, glued to the mammal’s hide; this work of art is born forth from an oneiric stud farm, illustrates an original mythology, incarnates a creature escaped from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a pagan stroke of genius.
MicheI Onfray
GALERIE de SOUZY – PAINTINGS – PURCHASE SALES ESTIMATE – EXPERT
Pollès by :
Maurice RHEIMS of the Academie française
Pollès’s power of giving life to the bronze by infusing it with a carnal quality enables him to combine the breath of sensuality with the gloving work of the metal-smith. […] In my mind this moulder of metal has taken his place among the illustrious initiates; a curious man, who handles the immensely heavy bronze with the elegant ease of one plucking down from a swan’s breast, shaping, sculpting and burnishing it into a blend of substances and fantasles.
Michel ONFRAY
Pollès sets himself the same challenge as a Renaissance artist, as all his sculpting work shows: he is classical, even if he at the same time works as a contemporary of his postmodern era. The son of Michelangelo and Boccioni. The Renaissance artist he is sculpts the same matter, using identical techniques, and similar forging tricks handed down from Vulcan. The same mystery of the forge, the same magic of the fire, the same transfiguration of raw ores into forms and volumes imagined in his steel soul.
Jean LACOUTURE
You have to have seen him, a golden-curled Vulcan […], in the workshop reverberating with the roar of futuristic machinery, from the casting – an event as moving as a mountain dawn – to the interminable stages of the polishing. […]But what could be less ‘mechanical’ than the work of our Tuscan Doctor Faust? What could ever be more fleshly, vital, succulent, or more inspired by the wild sap of life?
Régis DEBRAY
One day, walking along the sidewalk, I found myself halted, aggressed and challenged by a bronze figure in a window. […] The sense of aggression could have just faded away, but instead it dragged on into a persistent, insidious feeling of uneasiness. Unconsciously magnetized, magnetized by my unconscious, I went back the next day. That was how, someone going to a psychoanalyst for the first time.
Jacques LAURENT
What is he trying to express? He does not invent Woman, he reveals her through the imposition of his own vision, creating curves or angles according to the whim or the violence of his desire. He harboured a need to create, and to create Woman. He envisioned her through his heart and body. He fashioned her now as feminine, now as female, intoxicated by her curves.
Exhibitions :
2018 : Pollès Monumental Sculptures, Place du Louvre, Paris
2017 : Pollès at the Sagamore Hotel’s Garden, Miami
2009 : Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 83, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris
2001 : Le corps mis à nu: sculptures de Rodin à Vanessa Beecroft, Donjon de Vez
1998 : Orangerie et Jardin de Bagatelle, Bois de Boulogne, Paris
1997 : Fondation Prince Pierre 1er de Monaco, 4, boulevard des Moulins, Monaco
1994 : Musée Despiau-Wlérick, 6 place Marguerite de Navarre, Mont-de-Marsan
1991 : Palais Carnolès, Musée municipal, Menton
1989 : Palais Esterhazy, Wallnerstraße 4, Innere Stadt, Vienne
1986 : Poliakoff-Pollès, Musée Campredon – Centre d’Art, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue
1983 : Orangerie du Luxembourg, Paris
Bibliography :
Michel Onfray, «La Vitesse des simulacres. Les sculptures de Pollès», Galilée, Paris, 2008.
Sylvie Blin, « Pollès », Polistampa, Florence, 2003.
Ygaël Attali, « Filles de mémoire », Galilée, 2018
Exhibition Pollès – Megève
Place de l’Eglise
December 20, 2020 – April 15, 2021