Sarkis
20 Feb - 05 May 2013
SARKIS
The 42 Hours of the Wolf
20 February - 5 May 2013
When the major exhibition Hotel Sarkis — containing almost three hundred of what Sarkis calls ‘conversations’, each the result of an encounter with another creative artist’s pictorial, poetic, architectural, philosophical, musical or cinematographic work — opened at Mamco in February 2011, one emblematic work, The 42 Hoursof the Wolf, was missing. At Sarkis’s request, this work, now presented on forty-two lecterns, will remain on display at Mamco for almost a year, in the Atelier depuis 19380, thus continuing the dialogue between external works and the works in the Atelier.
Designed between Strasbourg and Paris, in the manner of a private diary, during the autumn of 1985, just as night was about to give way to the first glimmers of dawn, The 42 Hours of the Wolf (French title Les 42 heures du loup), painted in oil on metal holders for glass photographic plates, shine like forty-two oxymorons of the black sun of nostalgia. In his preface to the catalogue on the work published by the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts in 1989, Henry-Claude Cousseau describes them as ‘exploring and summoning up other nights, those within the memory, other spaces where darkness also reigns: the spaces of remembrance, of nostalgia, of lost distances like those of the camera obscura of the cinema auditorium.’
Like the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s film Hour of the Wolf, the time ‘when most people die, when most children are born, when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear’, Sarkis’s figures rise up against black backgrounds.‘Calcined’ images then appear on the surface of the glass,‘what is left when everything is over’, images in which we find the coloured counterpoints that recur throughout the work, the blazing red and the green, the deep blue of moonless nights and the yellow, to which are added the grey of‘Gramsci’s ashes’ and the gold of the ‘Museo del Oro’, set in impastos that ‘waver like flames’.
From Giorgione’s The Tempestto Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, from Alban Berg’s Lulu to Webern and Schönberg, Sarkis recalls his work, stretching time and space as he so often does. In these miniatures that are a blend of painting, photography and cinematographic image, the artist’s doppelgangers The Blacksmith and Captain Sarkis, familiar as they are with those outer reaches where the spirit of the living rubs shoulders with the souls of the dead, board a vessel that could be Charon’s ferry and set out to meet the universal or private myths underlying Sarkis’s work. The 42 Hours of the Wolf also conjure up the countless Kriegsschatz (treasures of war) that are also Leidschatz (treasures of suffering), cohorts of works or objects ‘endowed with the memory of their origins and the symbolic changes they may have undergone during their successive appropriations.’ What we see in Sarkis’s work is an equilibrium between life and death, day and night, harmony and chaos. Nothing is conceivable without its opposite; and it is this tension between opposites that reveals the strength of the work.
As in ancient poetry, the paintings are accompanied by a prolonged chant of fragmentary, syncopated titles, summoning up other worlds and naming the images in Sarkis’s very own style.
Sarkis was born in 1938. He lives in Paris and works in the studios he has opened in various countries (France, Switzerland and Turkey).
The 42 Hours of the Wolf
20 February - 5 May 2013
When the major exhibition Hotel Sarkis — containing almost three hundred of what Sarkis calls ‘conversations’, each the result of an encounter with another creative artist’s pictorial, poetic, architectural, philosophical, musical or cinematographic work — opened at Mamco in February 2011, one emblematic work, The 42 Hoursof the Wolf, was missing. At Sarkis’s request, this work, now presented on forty-two lecterns, will remain on display at Mamco for almost a year, in the Atelier depuis 19380, thus continuing the dialogue between external works and the works in the Atelier.
Designed between Strasbourg and Paris, in the manner of a private diary, during the autumn of 1985, just as night was about to give way to the first glimmers of dawn, The 42 Hours of the Wolf (French title Les 42 heures du loup), painted in oil on metal holders for glass photographic plates, shine like forty-two oxymorons of the black sun of nostalgia. In his preface to the catalogue on the work published by the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts in 1989, Henry-Claude Cousseau describes them as ‘exploring and summoning up other nights, those within the memory, other spaces where darkness also reigns: the spaces of remembrance, of nostalgia, of lost distances like those of the camera obscura of the cinema auditorium.’
Like the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s film Hour of the Wolf, the time ‘when most people die, when most children are born, when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear’, Sarkis’s figures rise up against black backgrounds.‘Calcined’ images then appear on the surface of the glass,‘what is left when everything is over’, images in which we find the coloured counterpoints that recur throughout the work, the blazing red and the green, the deep blue of moonless nights and the yellow, to which are added the grey of‘Gramsci’s ashes’ and the gold of the ‘Museo del Oro’, set in impastos that ‘waver like flames’.
From Giorgione’s The Tempestto Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, from Alban Berg’s Lulu to Webern and Schönberg, Sarkis recalls his work, stretching time and space as he so often does. In these miniatures that are a blend of painting, photography and cinematographic image, the artist’s doppelgangers The Blacksmith and Captain Sarkis, familiar as they are with those outer reaches where the spirit of the living rubs shoulders with the souls of the dead, board a vessel that could be Charon’s ferry and set out to meet the universal or private myths underlying Sarkis’s work. The 42 Hours of the Wolf also conjure up the countless Kriegsschatz (treasures of war) that are also Leidschatz (treasures of suffering), cohorts of works or objects ‘endowed with the memory of their origins and the symbolic changes they may have undergone during their successive appropriations.’ What we see in Sarkis’s work is an equilibrium between life and death, day and night, harmony and chaos. Nothing is conceivable without its opposite; and it is this tension between opposites that reveals the strength of the work.
As in ancient poetry, the paintings are accompanied by a prolonged chant of fragmentary, syncopated titles, summoning up other worlds and naming the images in Sarkis’s very own style.
Sarkis was born in 1938. He lives in Paris and works in the studios he has opened in various countries (France, Switzerland and Turkey).