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Maurice Blaussyld : exploding-fixed[1]
François Piron

“First, it always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change…”

– Plato, The Symposium, Diotima’s speech, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff

Something has changed in Maurice Blaussyld’s work. This is no small thing, given that his work has never had the notion of change at its heart, in fact, quite the opposite. Since the end of the 1980s, the artist has insisted on, persisted in showing a quantitively limited number of artefacts, as if to reiterate their passage through time, with datings that accumulate or diffract, thus establishing a kind of resistance to chronology, to the mutability of human time. A priori, it is a body of work that is founded on stasis rather than movement, constituted from objects seemingly mute, more defensive than offensive, always at the edges of the space, never central, like traces or relics, and from fragments of typewritten texts at once philosophical and poetic.

Something has changed, but what? Probably the way of seeing that we bring today to this work. It is often approached as a smooth and sheer wall eluding language and interpretation, as an aporia – art that refuses to be art, refuses art’s rules. Perhaps, today, we have an opening that will help us grasp things differently. We can start by realising that since the very beginning Maurice Blaussyld’s art has not been about conceiving forms, but working with forces.

The things he puts in the spaces of his exhibitions are not so much static, contained objects as they are apparitions, emergences, or to put it another way, events. They do not exist as immovable and fixed signifiers, but as emanations, possibilities. They may seem indifferent, yet in fact they are open to encounters and relationships because they never cease changing, occurring differently, their dates and sometimes technologies shifting. The “tapuscripts” transcribe what appear to be interior monologues. Unpunctuated, they often break off midway through a sentence, taking on the character of a thought in motion, fragmented and discontinuous.

The polyptych ……/proche and éloigné/…… […/close and afar/…] uses an aphoristic, haiku-like form to describe multiple forms of impermanence and instability, of the gaze as of thought, and this mixed in with chemical formulae that translate the tangible into the intangible, in other words, to render the question of reality unanswerable. The notion of finitude, as a borderline state of the unknowable, the incomprehensible, returns as a leitmotif in these text fragments, but then shatters under the determined replication of “atrocious images”[2] extracted by Blaussyld from a book of forensic medicine. Images of upside down bodies, or rather bodies with their insides outside; bodies cut up, incised, reified. These images appear without context in Maurice Blaussyld’s exhibitions, in all their cold precision and brutal reality. One of the tapuscripts offers: “The vision hones in on the cause of death through the radical incision of the body with a scalpel (…) The liveliness of historical time slices it and the gaze contemplates the cause of its existence such that its becoming is indefinitely shaped in its emergence”. As well as reflecting on the suspension of time that the image represents, Blaussyld, in decontextualizing these medical images, shows them in all their polysemy – they are at once pure, mute violence and biopolitical expression of the capture of bodies by the institutional apparatus, caught in the instance of their becoming things, the moment when the dead body becomes legal material, evidence. These images, which render death a scandal, constitute a form of the “critique of violence”, to use Walter Benjamin’s term. The fascination that these cadavers exert indicates that violence is, more than simply a means to a just or unjust end, more than a legal appropriation that denies the use of law to the individual, a “manifestation of existence” of the sacred, a representation of the “simple fact of living”.[3]

In Maurice Blaussyld’s world, the juridical gives way to a reflection on existence and its finitude. Just at the moment that death seizes the living, the living seize death.


1 This title is taken from the concluding line of the first chapter of André Breton’s L’ Amour fou (1937): “La beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle, ou ne sera pas” (Convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, exploding-fixed, magical-circumstantial, or it will not be at all).

2 An expression used by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel in the first text devoted to Maurice Blaussyld, published in the Documents journal in 1992, and broadcast by the artist in an installation composed of switched-off monitors from which images and sounds sporadically emerge: “Like this he must himself be the rescuer, the therapist; offering a cure to art, and a vision of its future in these figurative, materialized ideals that have always constituted art such as it is. Sometimes they are atrocious images and sometimes precise images, a beautiful image or no image, a voice, sometimes a simple description of what the work would have been if the artist had been able to exist in the kingdom of art that he is working to create.”

3 Walter Benjamin, « Critique de la violence », in Œuvres I, Paris, Gallimard, 2000. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, eds Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, in Selected Writings Volume 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999