Georges Jeanclos at Frank Lloyd - Santa Monica - Brief Article

Every sculpture in this selection from Georges Jeanclos's final 20 years featured the human figure except for one. That work, Urne (1977), managed, nevertheless, to be just as emotionally dense as the rest, and just as resonant with the fragility and fortitude of human life. Jeanclos wrapped Urne, a squat vessel in solemn gray terra-cotta, with thin layers of clothlike clay, not neatly but excessively, with abandon and a protective urgency. In slightly raised letters on the side of the piece, as if labeling the jar's metaphoric contents, appears the Hebrew word for "life." Life describes not just what is being guarded within, but the entirety of our process of guarding it.

Nearly all of the artist's terra-cotta figures are wrapped or enshrouded, and for Jeanclos, enclosure always doubles as both respite from danger and tender embrace. Born in 1933 into a Jewish family in Paris, Jeanclos (who died in 1997) spent one of his early years hiding with his family in the forests outside Vichy. What he described as "the moan coming from my childhood" permeates these works but is countered by an equally insistent affirmation of love and tenderness. His figures embody the fundamental human quest for safe haven, both physical and psychic.

His "Dormeurs" find refuge under blankets, beneath the protective shield of unconsciousness, the temporary death of sleep. Inspired by Etruscan funerary sculpture, the small, tabletop pieces comprise single figures and couples, at rest but, essentially, in hiding. Other, seated figures similarly turn inward in quiet reveries of self-preservation. Left exposed by their rough-hewn shrouds, their faces and scalps are preternaturally smooth, innocent, pure. The face, "exempt of all wounds and offenses," is for Jeanclos "a point of persistence," the embodiment of hope. In the Buddha-like "Kamakura" sculptures, heads perch atop pyramidal forms of utter stability, exuding an exquisite peace. Elsewhere, the head contrasts more jarringly with the vulnerability of the body, sheltered as it is by thin, dust-colored folds of clay, parched, peeling, cracked, veined and fissured.

Jeanclos's work oscillates from memorial to artifact to celebration and back again. Human fragility emerges as a question, answered in part by tender, protective gestures between figures--Adam reaching out to Eve in one instance, a woman cradling her lover's head in her lap, Pieta-like, in another--and through the act of wrapping. Jeanclos covers the body in cloth and the soul in prayer, through words of psalms and the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) inscribed in the clay. Life perseveres in Jeanclos's tremendously powerful work, but it cannot refute its nature as clay, the dust of origin, the dust of return.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group