What I write is not an intervention. I am speaking quite simply of a man, possessing by way of entitlement nothing but a friendship of almost 15 years, a passport perhaps to the wish I have today to write these few lines about him. Yet, in the face of the necessary impossibility – I say necessary as I might say arbitrary – of capping with a reference what cannot be referenced, because it falls rather to us to watch its life run, exaggerate itself, metamorphose, draw near to the blow it deals, this fantastic work gives us back the smile we show it.
This immense work, amid the multitude of tendencies, of gestures of every kind and I could go on, of stillborn works from which not even a muff will be made, appears like a Tower of Pisa in a desert of saucepans. What he makes is beautiful, that is the real given, beautiful as after the rain, beautiful as everything you miss, quite simply beautiful. This work, I was saying, call it what you will, this urge to make, perhaps, this consequence, why not, appears to me at a single blow, with the whole of the blow it deals, like a beam that cannot be carried because, to set it on one’s shoulder, one would have had to know the instructions for use, one of those tricks that leave you confounded by the urge to do as much… with words. I am straying, I was saying that this man or perhaps this animal, though he walks by compasses, by set square, by string line, by water level, has surprising ways of leading astray his followers, his beaters. If from as far off as he sees you he falls into step behind you and the absence that follows – should you miss the parry – is the next blow, the ball bounces back (I too am making a collage) and, I was saying… ah yes, if the poem is the hinge of the sky he proposes, better to go about with a lightning conductor, a mini lightning conductor, an object he will surely invent, why not – he so loves the objects one believes to be of no use – …a Sphinx on wheels that I saw at his home, that object he prefers: La Face Nord, that classic, as he says, in which the mere seething of the chest need envy nothing of the evaporation of a hive; I was forgetting Judith of the conical face, whose throat, encircled by a withered map of the world, howls like a semicolon over the antechamber of the shelf of riddles. Others still seem to ask you in passing how their name is spelt, but perhaps I am mistaken, those can only be numbers, a countdown in motion, the time of a vertical duration, timed to the minute, that will end only at the stridulation of the locust. If the hierarchy of this family has been consummated, no doubt all it now lacks is the uncle and the aunt and also the stowaway – the object that Le Yaouanc will not have made and will be unable to recognise as his own – a third person whose presence and speed of inertia will balance this clamorous reality. Drowned in a sea whose door is a well, the harvest of these heads will have, to bring to birth, only the opening of a single mouth from which will spring the cry, the bird, the mask, the baphomet… the apocalypse… I saw there Napoleon on Saint Helena, the man with wooden eyes, I saw, the souvenir-object of a telephone call…
It began with the point – I imagine – the point that was line and stroke thereafter, then the curve that gave the hand the chance to make space precise, with the right angle that disfigures reality and fabricates a question [an error of typesetting and transcription appears on pages 25–27 of the book: we restore the complete sentence here in its original version]. The field of vision opened to the improbable play of writing turned electric, and in this newly calculated reality, the work spun its silk to protect its chrysalis and make a nest. Here everything is new, everything has passed out of history, for the cry sent forth has not yet crossed the perimeter of its echo. The transmission continues, the dream grows in the zigzag of its desire. I meant to say none of this. It came to me because I was no longer thinking of it, because I had forgotten the painter and all the supports that were needed for this work to last, all the tenses that were needed to conjugate in the present, all the difficulties that had to be skirted, all the life that had to be killed.
Alain Le Yaouanc’s first works were constructed, gouached, infernal drawings, which he called quite simply his gouaches. The capital importance of these few drawings, which were the undeniable hearth of all that we have the good fortune to see today, shows to what extent his concern to ruin (used in the text in the sense of to await) space was the water of his life. The man took enormous risks: the impossibility of betraying himself, and the reciprocal constant he had to find again at each of his halts, could in no case leave him the leisure of being of this world.
For Le Yaouanc there were no limits, striking the fish in the water or throwing himself out of the window. An invincible marksman, he attained the sublime in one of the principal pieces of that period: an immense gouache on which he worked for practically three months without interruption. In it one sees the Sacred Mountain, Mount Meru, the Gopurams that must be passed, the God Pan who must be met, the Stacking of Kâf and the Body become Athanor… Le Yaouanc is very reticent about this work. He practically never shows it. That was in 1966.
But space is dangerous and keeps for its inventor only inedible crumbs. The gesture went on, harmony rose to its feet, and the fantastic human reason that balances crimes as readily as deficits knew, implacably, how to organise. Holes are made in walls, fear is provoked, and poetry is always there, saving, abrupt, complicit. Thought knows how to beget, knows how to cross the fords.
I have the impression at times that Le Yaouanc has undergone every baptism, that of fire as well as those of water, that of cold as well as that of heat. The work is immense, and the unfathomable sea of memory that bears it has its equal only in the fall it proposes. At times I could believe that the man was going to disown his identity as an archaeologist, that he was going, in his struggle with the other, to abandon the use of his word. It did not come to pass. This man of facets, of disconcerting personalities, of varying statures, a giant by night, a dwarf in the morning, with hands like a bird’s talons, has known how to dishevel the time of his childhood and to shut up in his Aladdin’s lamp the power of never letting himself be recognised. There was the time of the gouaches, and that is saying no small thing… Then, since at the acceleration of his thought the line no longer sufficed, Le Yaouanc delved into the eternal glossary of the engraved object, of the encyclopaedic reality of the world made Lilliputian. He no longer drew the bird, he took it. He no longer, with his ruler, his ruling pen and his set square, drew the cube or traced the circle, he quite simply threw them to the magnetism of his target: transparency. What I say is equivocal, nevertheless, few have seen in the gouaches, the collages and in the entire work this permanent concern of Le Yaouanc’s to add what one does not see: this transparency, this reserve of a renewable distance that only a moment’s inattention could yet dispel. If there have been several dynasties of collages, the first contains the endearing discoveries from which he has never parted.
This unskilfulness of the first step gave him from the outset, in the land of collage, the sizeable fief he deserved. At a time already distant, he called the yield of this miraculous lode: L’Encyclopédie Métaphysique. It was the exhibition he held that year (exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, December 1970) that led him to meet Aragon and to fill him with wonder. The titles he gave his collages: Le Goliath au pied du mur, Le Mercenaire dévoile son passé, L’Aventure dans un flacon, L’Objet futur n’est pas encore répertorié…, were like so many brandenburgs on a dolman of snow. Curious thing, in the millennium of his invention and in the multiple durations he inaugurated, a mongrel has always come out of the kennel to run after the pack: gouaches at the summit of the hour, drawings in the afternoon, collages in the morning, paintings in the evening, objects at the window of his cliff, projects, too, made minuscule the better to carry them, Le Yaouanc has known how to answer all the vacuities of his intelligence. In truth, we owe our knowing Le Yaouanc to Patrick Walberg, who was able, from his very first meeting with him, to recognise his gifts and to present them.
Whatever in France today may be the spirit of painting, of the tendency that accredits the work, to the irritation of a philosophy of the unmade, the too simple or the disfigured – this necessity of giving lack such worth over thought – our surprise is great when what ought to be seen and known is invariably subjected to the night of tentacular indifference.
Le Yaouanc’s painting appears at the summit of this indecipherable rejection, like a bridge thrown with the precision of one of those machines for conquering space towards a coming generation, and whose hidden code serves for the moment only to make schoolboys’ aeroplanes.
There are men whose only life is to make, independently of our wills and our classifications. There are men, I would rather say beings, who complete, in the verticality of their night and in the silence of our contempt, the rough sketch of our perceptions. Let us call these people poets, seers, adepts, artists, apprentices, these articulated men whose memory is like the yardstick of our refusal must also be, by the very nature of their gestures, wise men. I mean to put this word to the use it is seldom given: magician. The one I speak of here is of this nature, of the tribe of those who hold deep within themselves the secret of our existences and who know the next step, that invisible exaggeration of death which becomes, by the twist of a pleasure they alone know how to practise, understanding, opening, even recognition.
Rarely have these people had a face. But rather, by the mask they dare to clasp to the rictus of their profile, they bear, as a guard to the movements of their blow, the Luciferian brow from which perhaps the stone is escaping still. In this fundamental work where magic exerts its power at every instant, we find ourselves always confronted with the vertigo given by the symbolism of the unspoken and the unwritten. Only the audible and the sonorous are the shaft of the hair on which our tooth catches.
Everything asks, in order to be known, that one know a little of it. This Janus-faced work asks of us the effort of being able to reconcile at the same instant two contradictory actions, two opposed dreams, asks us to mingle the high and the low, touch and glimpse.
Le Yaouanc, and all his hieroglyphs, is the tattooed instrument of a future generation, of those boys born at the hinges of troubled epochs and whose life, in its marginal and aberrant aspect, yet a true power, seems to have no more importance than a penny thrown into a fountain.
Carmen Martinez Paris, April 1979