Ne dit ni ne cache / Not say nor hide

At first glance, the work of Maurice Blaussyld can appear beyond understanding and impenetrable however this is to better accommodate the inner vision of the beholder. No beginning, no end. There is nothing to explain. The works are their own reflections and reasons to exist. One only needs to concentrate on what is, to accept a universality to be completely enveloped within the work of Maurice Blaussyld.

Not Say Nor Hide can lead us to discern what is visible and immediately perceptible in the exhibition space, but also perhaps especially, what is not. The first installed room in the gallery – in which access is rendered impossible by a glass wall – only the that of sight can touch the different levels as there are only signs to traverse. These points are aligned to mentally in order to project the diagrammatic drawing, both geometery and geography, that has ordered the exhibition. A prism with multiple meanings and faces, impossible to abstract from what we see or think we see, the vertical planes that define the first proposal provides the support of a sound recording. A female voice emanates from the walls to reach us individually as her breath are more significant than the words recited. Speech and silence are in perfect unity and becomes one.

Neither speech, nor time, nor space can separate the artworks here. Moreover, chronology does not exist in Blaussyld’s works, as his works are forever emerging an d in turn in their perpetual appearances. They respect in a certain way, an epiphany phenomenon, under the etymology of the word, which gives weight to the apparition of the image in order to give it its evidence.

The same is true for Blaussyld’s exhibitions where time is to be understood without chronological order, infinite in both directions. Everything will happen and become real. An infinity that is not without developing a temporal disorder based on the memory of the image, of the form. And this is exactly our impression at the discovery of his last self-portrait. Exhibited idle, activation is still possible. Thus, the artist’s face appears then falls back into the darkness only seconds later.

A distance and a silence(1) become necessary, and these are the words that aid in the resistance of analysis of Maurice Blaussyld’s work. These Works that do no t say [or] not hide.

Arlène Berceliot Courtin, Paris, 2013.

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1 “Maurice Blaussyld’s work generates distance and silence. When I’m asked to talk about him, I tend rather to look for reproductions of his work and show them. When I’m asked to write about him, I’d prefer to limit myself to a litany of words, in order to cross out as many of them as possible.” Jan Hoet, “Distance et Silence”, S.M.A.K., Musée d’art contemporain de Gand (1998), cited in Maurice Blaussyld, exhibition catalogue, Centre d’arts plastiques et visuels de Lille, 2010, p. 10 (available at the gallery)