THE FREE PENCIL
Here is the work of a thoughtless child. This act is the total desire for a new beginning. Between power and emptiness, creation is not free. This fracture represents a universal stop. However, the tree unveils the heart of matter, defines the love of polarities. The symbol expresses an energy between elements, an invisible bond, a power in presence, a captured moment. There is always history in a pencil.
"The Free Pencil"
Redwood and graphite tip detail.
"The Free Pencil"
Detail of the natural break of the redwood.
"The Free Pencil"
Redwood and graphite.
495cm x 51cm
2015
Here suspended in the hall of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
THE FREE PENCIL
One day, a sequoia fell in front of me. Its trunk split in two parts. The fracture condensed its last cry with the force of those final expressions that translate the transition from one state to another. To my eyes, the tree had disappeared, and I could only see a huge pencil broken in two. The mind questions the gaze. For the gaze, the materialization of a collective unconscious appears (I see an Ikea pencil...), while the mind embraces the ineffable of a great common silence. This shattered pencil preexisted. It is the implosion of a given universe, seized in a last act of appearance. An object victim of its potential.
What child has not understood at some point that the drawing pencil becomes, at a certain moment, the pencil of the story, and that every story is consumed time? What child has not broken a pencil at some point and tested its power to stop everything? A broken pencil is the pinnacle of a pencil, the fracture a point of no return, the gesture an eternal forgetfulness. But the fracture is also fission, positive and negative face to face, running between two poles. A fascinating relationship that I constantly venerate because it is always between oneself and the rest that our consciousness exists. And is not that one of the magics of the pencil, to contain a heart of possibilities that connects us to everything.
Man is ambivalent. On the one hand, he feels and thinks, on the other hand, he designates and acts. Our ambivalence is found in this fracture. It is the struggle of the brains, the intuitive and the rational, the left hand and the right hand. As an indispensable auxiliary, the pencil is a point, a situation, but also a pivot from our magical world to the real world, a tool that designates will, desire, and history.
A sculpture encompasses its place, orientation, material, subject, aspect... but very curiously also its time. This big pencil is a moment, a break, a fraction. It speaks to us of its present stopped, and yet there is a before and an after the fracture.
On January 8, 2015, the world outside merged into affliction. The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were victims of a terrorist attack the day before in Paris. On that same day, the sequoia broken in two received its graphite lead. After hundreds of hours of mutation, I caress it with a few final sandings. But the pencil outside is a sort of symbol, the fracture too.
In the studio, it is there, doubly finished, it seems to be caught in its time, and its meaning is contradicted. Yet its silence between the margins of emptiness precedes inspiration and remains in a family of questions. A collective image spreads like wildfire in the newspapers; the symbol is there, warm and real beside me. What to do? It is strange and grotesque in every sense of the term.
It is a new pencil and a destroyed pencil that we are given to see, that is to say, a totality, the creative act in the present, seized between power and emptiness.