Texts of Gérard Durozoi, Philippe Cyroulnik, René Viau, France Gascon


for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition "1962 - 2002"
At the CRAC/19, Montbéliard, France in 2001
Espace Sculfort / IDEM+ARTS, Maubeuge, France
Museum of Fine-Arts, Joliette, Québec, Canada, 2002

back to exhibition / back to index / interview with Philippe Cyroulnik and René Viau 

français
Gérard Durozoi
art historian, philosopher

A salute to Jean Noël

 

Before getting to what has hallmarked his work for twenty years or so, Jean Noël was involved in a series of experiments, some of which were quite removed from even a very broad definition of sculpture as we ordinarily understand it.

His choice of non-representation was nevertheless made early on. It can be said that his career shows a certain number of solutions enabling him, in the end of the day, to challenge and undermine anthropomorphism, but it's still noteworthy that the only thing he conceded to anthropomorphism was the half-body casting made in 1961, when he was still a student. In the 1960s, invariably hasty attempts, giving rise to just a small number of works, were made with the classic materials of modern sculpture--bronze, painted wood (it was in the mid-1960s that he started to see the need for colour to be at one with all manner of volume), and metal sheets. In 1967, he mixed some of these materials to produce a few small mobiles--a cobbled-together tribute to Calder--occasionally helped in their movements by electric motors. He then came up with simple volumes, fractured cubes that could be taken to pieces (as if, this time, movement was to be initiated not within the work itself, by the mechanical connections linking the various parts together, but through the prior intervention of the person installing and manipulating the forms--which, perforce, culminates in a movement that is as if blocked or set), and designed a labyrinth made of metal sheets, presented with hemispheres affixed to the walls.

Late 1967 was significant because it showed a shift from the horizontal presentation plane (be it floor, surface or ground outside) to the possibility of hanging works vertically. This switch would be a productive one for some time. Jean Noël then realized that interventions that could be conceived on and in space are actually much more open than is traditionally admitted by sculptors (and sculpture enthusiasts). Far from sticking to the official distinction made between sculpted volume and bas-relief, he started to blur their features and stand aloof from an, in a way, invariably pre-ordained and implicit definition of sculpture as a vertical inscription in space, or at the very least as a volume (also including a volume with as many holes in it as you like, and even when it is wider than it is high) set on a plane. From here there was a kind of slightly paradoxical generalization of the presentation space: the paradox resided in the fact that sculpture, which is reckoned to be a three-dimensional art, is forever--including in its modernist versions--dealing lopsidedly with the three dimensions as factors producing tensions and forms. It favours verticality or, at best, the relation between vertical and horizontal, in such a way that the space in which it acts is amputated, if not strictly speaking depth-wise (because it certainly presents a material depth which tallies with our everyday space of perception), then at least in terms of depth that really does generate dynamics. As a result, there is a "generalization" of its space when, in becoming detached from a wall, the worked form tends to shatter any relation with a horizontal acting as its support and surface. Through its way of proceeding in perceptive space, it asserts the materialization of an obviously local space, but one that has become indifferent to any location of a "ground".

Shedding implicit verticality was too complex an operation to be accomplished right away. Proof of this lies in the Ovoïdes which appeared in 1968. These heat-moulded, coloured plexiglas shells had a form which retained a main reading line that ran from top to bottom. With the result that their presentation might have confirmed their apparent independence in relation to the floor, but the flat edge surrounding them reproduced an incongruous pedestal-like effect. It is evident that they are placed on the wall and that they don't in any way seem to loom out from it, or form any kind of excrescence. Nor did the Overexpansibles which followed them up until 1972, repeating a horizontal module, manage to put an end to the heterogeneity of the work and its surface. The issue of developing works that can be regarded no longer as interventions or modifications in space, but rather interventions or activations of space itself, still need to be dealt with. What, on the other hand, was established was the importance of the shadow created on the wall by the shape, at the same time as the possible interplay of light reflecting on the material.
Retrospective commentary probably runs the risk of discovering achievements, in the earlier phases of the work, whose productivity is subsequently proven, whereas all that was involved, in the day to day reality of the praxis, was tentative approaches and tests carried out in a rather groping manner, the lesson of which would only be explained very slowly. The fact nevertheless remains that, as seen from today's standpoint, the ten years that commenced in late 1968 appeared to show certain concerns in Jean Noël's work which, by way of the apparent diversity of his activities, merged to some extent in a challenge focusing on the many ways in which more or less defined forms and colours can cause upheavals and disturbances, as well as positive markings of a space that is not exclusively the space of aesthetically-inclined perception, but which rather comes across like the space in which we act, move about and live in a very everyday way.

This space may be partly taken up--in particular by series of inflated vinyl pouches, welded together. What is significant here is the possibility of using these pouches in different ways--either arranged like a caterpillar whose ends are affixed to the ceiling, or laid on the floor in a straight or wavy line, or piled up, and inflated to a greater or lesser degree. It is as much their appearance as their presentation that is altered in each show, as if it were a matter of experiencing the reception capacities of the space for a transformable object, or, vice versa, the capacities for modifying the object on the basis of the space where it must momentarily be shown; and as if it were also a matter of experimenting with a maximum of inter-relations possible between an unstable form and the display spaces. In 1969, these pouches were followed by simple volume-less modules, either stitched or fixed together with plastic screws, set on the floor--needless to add, they can be likened to the Floor Pieces produced by Carl Andre from 1966 on, which Jean Noël did not, however, know about at that time--to the point where such a proposition seemed to sidestep any line of thinking about the overall space, by focusing on the plane. But then came cotton cloths, either in stitched strips forming a large quadrangular format with alternating colour and void, or in solid, monochrome surfaces, whereby the plane, which was distorted by the tensions caused by the hanging, really did upset the space, because they could be arranged diagonally in a room, defining distinct places in it and acting as a fragile partition separating an inside from an outside, and a here from an over there, in a single volume. The exhibition volume was thus fragmented by an arrangement whose simplicity was matched only by its effectiveness. It was the totality of the space earmarked for walking about in that revealed hitherto unnoticed properties, in its ability to split itself up, and halt or hamper certain gestures. In tandem, when these works were shown behind glass in an architectural space that let in the daylight, they reactivated what might be the role of this latter in the experienced space: they intercepted or filtered it, but they could just as much glorify it by the interplay of their colour.
From 1971 on, Jean Noël seemed to temporarily abandon such arrangements and devices in order to devise a series of actions, get involved in short films and photography, and drift towards body art. In these activities, however, there was still an approach to the balance of bodies and to the distortions that a surface or a predefined volume (especially a carnal one) may undergo. This is certainly what happened, for example, when Jean Noël asked four people to unfold a huge piece of stitched cloth and fold it back up again. There was probably nothing terribly outstanding about this exercise; its advantage, in fact, was that it gave the onlooker's consciousness access to the reality of his own gesturality--otherwise put, the reality of the inclusion of his own body and his own movements in space. And, with its unspectacular aspect, this exercise may also have reminded the onlooker of household chores as commonplace as folding newly washed and ironed sheets. Similarly, the photographs (subsequently printed on cloth) of a naked body partly covered with inscriptions gave the skin a slightly novel definition; it is no longer just what separates organic space from surrounding space, it can become a surface to be read--and for the model himself who thus acts quite differently than in his mirror--the experience of a disconcerting sense of being outside yourself. In the exercises where he makes himself up, as shown by large photographs, Jean Noël would experience on his own personal behalf this capacity to turn your own body into an object, relate the facial volume to an almost pictorial surface, and de-personalize what is initially the thing that is the most unusual and odd. These experiences--and experiments--, which seem to hail from whims and restless questing, did possibly help the artist to check whether such practices, which were so very much attuned to the mood of the 1970s, were definitely too rooted in the real--in other words, they obviously lacked any metaphorical dimension and any sublimation, to merit being more permanently carried on. Nevertheless, they were carried out--even if it seems very hard to specify what was retained in the subsequent work. We might tentatively think that this passage through the utopia of a more or less complete confusion between art and a slightly transformed everdayness was necessary for a sculpture conceived as totally independent to then be asserted.

The year 1979 saw the appearance of Arcs and Mers/Seas. In these works certain materials were preferred--and for some of them this preference would be on a once-and-for-all basis: painted wood, steel rods, glass, stretched cloths--as were certain contrasts: transparency and opaqueness, stability and imbalance, forms that were strictly defined, and elements that were as if left unfinished. The stretched cloths on steel rods played on the resistances peculiar to each materials; the Seas (large works, taking up a virtual volume of 4 x 2 x 2 metres) were made with particularly vibratory rods--you just had to brush against them for them to vibrate for a long time, disseminating both movement and sound. The Matisse blue partly colouring them was probably a tribute, but there was also a tribute paid in the subtle adjustment of their elements, which increased the angles of vision at the same time as it relished the play on void and solid, curves and angles, rigour and abandonment. The use of the allusive title--in which the problem of the relations between nature and culture was brought all the more to the fore because certain materials were obviously of industrial origin--was extended in the Garden exhibition held in 1983: the pieces shown were called Lune jaune/Yellow Moon, Motif floral/Flower Pattern no.1 and Zéphyr. Their technical description was less evocative: "paint on laminated wood and nylon", "acrylic on corrugated polyester, steel", "paint on wood, paper, nylon, steel, copper". But in the text he signed for the occasion, Jean Noël showed a lyricism that was not devoid of aggressiveness: "For me, what matters above all is creating events that transmit energy, because energy is all that matters... and also working out of sheer pleasure, looking for the perfume of things, ready to evaporate, the essence... and then trying to avoid eclipsing the Real under the hysterical productivity discourse and the hijacking of resources and energies in megalomaniacal projects to develop this planet as a human zoo".

It is hardly surprising that commentators of the day emphasized the floral allusions, and the evocation of a possible "paradise", be it lost or to be regained. They were themselves ensnared by the descriptive cues of the pieces shown--tree-trunks, leaves, branches, round moon shape etc..--which almost barred a more formal perception of these sculptures. But this latter is probably better suited to describe the unusualness of the approach. The "plants" were actually handled with artificial materials, and the colouring of the pieces was only very partially "realist": there was certainly green, yellow and ochre, and other possible references to the colour range that indicates, without any possibility of misunderstanding, that we are dealing with the features of a landscape, but their arrangements and their impact were calculated on the basis of the relations entertained by the various elements between themselves, the elements making up each piece solely to form an image complying with a deep-seated concern for verisimilitude. In addition, Jean Noël only uses a limited number of forms, which are variously combined from one piece to the next, and invariably assembled with slender metal rods whose evocative power is due to their function and their position, but not to the way they look. In such a way that its "evocation" results first and foremost from a kind of combination, where you sense that it might well show its productivity independently of any motif. His sculpture is actually "minimalist", but in the specific sense where, for him, it involves not exploring the possible declensions of "primary" or strictly geometric structures, but rather reducing the motif to the minimum by guaranteeing its recognition. This is when he is probably most akin to an artist such as Richard Tuttle, with the slight difference that he grants more importance and value than this latter to the suggestions of his materials and to the spacing between the parts of each sculpture. He prefers the airy and ventilated, the dynamic distance and a linkage defined by the suppleness of a flexible rod and by the weight of what is attached thereto, to the compactness and serriedness of the elements. Instead of a rigorous programming, he exercises an empirical adjustment, a kind of noble DIY based on the requirements of his resins, wood and iron. Far from being static and fixed, the sculptures always seem ready to quiver and tremble; they suggest fragile, fleeting arrangements. The "hydrodynamic" forms are especially symptomatic, devised as they are to be put on the floor, even though their contact with it is very slight: they are like the blueprints of aquatic motions, grasping the uncertain split-second that separates ebb and flow by deducing them from one another. Although their form seems simple--a finely honed spindle or blade--, all you have to is approach them from several viewpoints to realize their complex subtleness, made up of reversed curves and the discreet alterations of a convexity. With Jean Noël, the apparent simplicity is a trap; it disguises a host of partial connections, which are all the more effectual because, at first glance, they elude: the surface of a piece of wood is slightly undulating, and not flat, the paint covering it shows unevennesses, the distribution of a colour turns out not be all that systematic, a cut-out is not as symmetrical as you first thought, the way a surface clings to the wall calls for variable distances and spaces, etc... To be content with generally pinpointing the way the forms are articulated is tantamount to doing without a series of pleasures bound up with the gradual discovery of these "details", whose accumulation ensures the presence of each piece, whose very title, together with the summary it proposes, is nothing other than an additional decoy. Were there need for proof thereof, suffice it to imagine the different meaning that each and every work may take on when you alter their presentation, for example by putting on the floor something that called to mind a "tree", or affixing a hydrodynamic form to the wall. The piece thus altered not only retains all its coherence, but also acquires a different effectiveness--what seemed identifiable as tree-trunk and branches turns out to be the support for a suspended form, and the "wave" turns into a "cloud", or into the quivering of pure space. This is a rather rare polyvalence in contemporary sculpture, which confirms that the combinatory work is more concerned with the links between elements than with their possible empirical significance.

In the late 1980s, forms finally gave up evoking anything remotely nameable. In a very logical way, titles became mere descriptions of the component parts of sculpture. This was sometimes done with a very special kind of wit--as with Rosa, rosae, rosam (1989), which rigorously designates the declension of three indisputably pink forms coming from one and the same surface. But usually it was done in a neutral way: Avatars, Sui generis, Triangles, Bancal jaune et rose, Isométrie, Up'n down (jaune bleu). All that was spelt out was colours, processes, forms, balances and their opposites, in other words, the things that every sculpture is very precisely made of. Materials were less numerous: disappearance of wood and metal rods, almost exclusive use of coloured resins, various types of plastic and light hardware items (needles, screws). From this point on, the sculptures came across as articulations of coloured planes in space, relieved of any kind of motif. They thus achieved their most general definition, at the same time as their most marked singularity (which owed its obviousness to anything but materials, even if these were not the commonest), to the point where it was possible to dispute the term "sculptures", so disconcerting did their features seem--had the expression not already been monopolized by Don Judd, it would be tempting to regard them as "specific objects", but we shouldn't pursue the idea because Jean Noël's production was more removed than ever from the rigour of historical minimalism.

In these recent works, Jean Noël confirms the impossibility of public statuary. It isn't solely because statuary has lost something of its necessity, on account of the dislocation of great narratives, be they religious or political, which might structure the social body by erasing its cracks. It's also, if not even more so, because sculpture set in the public place is the victim of its function and its possible uses. Its public ranges across the board, because it is randomly sampled--on the basis of mood and a quite fleeting availability--in an anonymous throng. So it doesn't address a subjectivity any more, but rather an average "one", stripped of distinctive features, discovering it, wandering about, like a more or less noteworthy marking of the urban space. It may be noted that this anonymity, in some sense, rebounds on public sculpture itself and on its conception, culminating in interchangeable productions, whose authors one might often be excused for muddling up (1)... But this is possibly not the most serious thing. What seems most harmful is that what results above all is that, far from being able to activate space in any specific way, such works don't owe their own reality to their site, or to the way they are placed in an urban system--they are thus dependent on a previously formed space, within which their effectiveness is not to be found.
Because Jean Noël has chosen to activate space (which simply means that he intends to fully assume his responsibility as a sculptor), and introduce qualities which are absent from it, as long as his works don't reveal them, his recent pieces are committed to intervening in interior volumes. Which has nothing to do with the intimacy and dimensions of his works, but refers, rather, to the need, first and foremost, to define the space which has to be rendered perceptible.

Since our daily connection which what surrounds us is still organized by the principles of Euclidian geometry (2), it is necessary to extract from the general space, playing the part of an undifferentiated environment, a local space in which differentiations can occur. These latter are produced by articulations of coloured surfaces, and by their essentially disconcerting, puzzling aspect, because in them are asserted outlines and forms which not only dodge all manner of description, albeit approximate, but also elude our perceptive habits based on an on-going reference to the right angle. The surfaces proposed by Jean Noël define variable, but never right-, angles. This is the first cause of disarray, at once perceptible and conceptual, because the orthogonal references which underpin the traditional geometry of what is perceived are here challenged. But the surfaces themselves are rarely flat, and the cut-outs producing them are likewise uneven. Each and every surface in itself is not easy to put a name to--it is only in very rough terms a triangle, or a rectangle, and it is much more frequent because it doesn't tally with any classically listed figure--the edges undulate and curve alternately in one direction and then the other, in turn sidestepping all naming. To which are added the extremely subtle effects of colour, varying from one surface to the next (which is hardly disturbing and emphasizes the articulations), but modulated where necessary on each surface--which may be a little more bothersome--and at times changing through broaching a sort of material which, by dint of micro-overspills and partial botches, may make the strict identification of each surface somewhat delicate... Added to this set of difficulties, which turns each piece into a nucleus putting up powerful resistance to our perceptive and intellectual grasp, are the shadows cast on the wall--by definition variable--which merely swell the awkwardness of the description. It would seem impossible to have any control over such forms--everything happens as if they were being shown to us, initially, solely to cause us a more effectual puzzlement.

The fact is that their deployment and their articulations are probably due to their inner demands, and to what in some way is claimed by the first surface and the first cut-out adopted, with its outline and its colour. They are thus all compliant with what Sui generis formulated in 1991. The piece in question shows how a form develops in space which only obeys what is sketched by the first generative lines--they present the gradual expansion of a kind of double wave, which gradually runs out of steam and ends up in tiny extremities, curving in the opposite direction. But this sculpture is one of the rare ones which, by way of its compact volume, seems to drive away the space around it to find its own site. Most of Jean Noël's recent sculptures, on the other hand, are open forms, which work their way into space by defining locations, as well as possible shifts, displacements and permutations--works which in no way invade the space, but which, to the contrary, assert a kind of transitory character, and probably single out virtual planes and volumes, but which are also ways of giving to the space itself a sort of life and flesh. All the more so, too, because they suggest the possibility of their extensions in space--if only by the way in which the outlines are not straightforwardly or clearly cut out, but are, on the contrary, slightly "runny", giving glimpses of the depth of the material and its colour. As a result, each sculpture has a metonymic range--it unfurls its effects beyond its material boundaries. Lack of differentiation thus gives rise to unusual occupations, as if it were being condensed or coagulated, by a specific motion, in order to offer ordinarily imperceptible tensions and energy lines.

So sculpting is just using your materials to give the space in which they will be incorporated a chance to reveal their potential. Ahead of all form there is the formless, and the artist's work consists simply in making the shift from the latter to the former. The person who accompanies his itinerary with the requisite attentiveness gains therefrom a whole lot more than mere pleasure--another way of situating yourself in what is undifferentiated, a new way of grasping this latter so as to sense in it that things, places and spaces as they are ordinarily admitted are merely awaiting our wish to be transformed and offer us versions that are more accommodating of desire.

Gérard Durozoi
Translated by Simon Pleasance <spleasance@aol.com>
-------------
Notes
1. As is shown, after the fact, by the two outdoor sculptures produced by Jean Noël in 1967; whatever their qualities might be, Trimodulaire orangé and Hémicycle orangé do not convey a powerful singularity in relation to many other propositions of the time. Which can also be laid at the door of the artist's young age...
2. Which, it should be said in passing, encompasses "historical" minimal artworks (Judd, Andre, LeWitt, etc.).

Interview with Jean Noël
conducted by Philippe Cyroulnik director of Centre d'art contemporain, Montbéliard,
and René Viau, art critique, writer and curator of the exhibition
on March 27, 2001, at the artist's studio, Cité Griset, Paris 11e

 Of Fluid Mechanics

Philippe Cyroulnik: Can you tell us about your early years?

J.N.: At school, I drew. I began making sculpture as soon as I could hold a penknife. And I took drawing lessons. Later, in 1957, I was fascinated by the Impressionists and their desire to capture pure light: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet. I began painting. At twenty, I started at Montreal's École des beaux-arts. After two and a half years, they told me I'd never make an artist!

P.C.: What do you remember most from this two-and-a-half year period? Your move towards sculpture? Or your meetings with other young artists?

Jean Noël: In the first year, they made us paint like Cézanne. I learned more about the Impressionists. Then I lost interest in painting, and my natural inclinations soon led me to sculpture.

P.C.: Who were the dominant figures on Montreal's art scene when you started at the École des beaux-arts?

J.N.: In sculpture, Armand Vaillancourt was a source of considerable energy. In painting it was Jacques de Tonnancourt, abstract pictorialism and textures.

P.C.: I'd like to talk a little more about this. The Refus global (1948), a vitally important historical underpinning of Quebec art, has to do with abstraction but also with the automatic writing of surrealism. This manifesto creates a connection between surrealism and an artistic approach that had developed in North America. So there was Abstract Expressionism on the one hand, but nourished by the European experience, and on the other a powerful movement of geometric abstraction that had begun in the 1950s, with painters like Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant. This is a bit simplistic, since there were a number of artists who came somewhere in the middle, like Charles Gagnon. Still, it's a quick overview that gives us an idea of the main elements of the Quebec landscape in which you found yourself as a young artist. You say, "I lost interest in painting." From a European perspective, when one looks at the way the Quebec scene was developing prior to the 1980s, one is struck - although one must be careful not to be too categorical here - by the emergence of practices based on sculpture, installation, photography. Did these practices seem perhaps more significant to you than other strictly pictorial approaches?

J.N.: Refus global, the mythical ancestor. I missed it. But I soon found things in common with Serge Lemoine, Serge Tousignant, Cozic - other artists of my generation.

René Viau: It doesn't seem to me that this rage, this cry of "global refusal" really corresponds to the world of Jean Noël.

J.N.: Gestural painting was of little interest to me. I had some catching up to do. I was mostly interested in classical sculpture: Phidias, Michelangelo, Donatello, and later Rodin, Degas, Richier. In my third year, my main influence was César. Not the compressions, which came later, but the Expressionist César, the soldered birds. I was fascinated by the human figure, bird forms. After art school, I was impressed by the monumental sculptures of the Aztec and Maya cultures. Then there was Moore, Brancusi, Arp. In 1966 I applied pure colours to large, simple volumes cut straight from tree trunks with a chain saw. And cubes in one piece, or composed of several elements. To introduce movement, I experimented with large-scale mobiles that children could turn. And then there was the revelation of the Japanese kite I saw at Montreal's Expo 67. An endless Tantric caterpillar balanced by plant-like stems and a paper tail, undulating up there in the breeze. What a marvel of ingenuity and lightness! I made many kites, but not necessarily built according to the rules. That wasn't the point. And then everything changed. My forms gradually became rounder, lighter, moved to the wall, doubled up, and then multiplied and invaded space. Static sculpture, on the floor - how boring! I'd finished with it by 1968.

R.V.: There was a generational thing happening in the mid-1960s. Many artists with completely different preoccupations were feeling the same impulse to alter the artistic status quo. Did you share this feeling, or was it a more personal evolution?

J.N.: I was stuck in my own little classical world until about 1965. I hung out with wood "whittlers" and foundry workers, sweaty and grunting - it was a glorious, naïve period, with the furnace roaring and spilling its tons of molten iron into my sand moulds. But I soon began looking elsewhere, especially to California - specifically Venice. DeWain Valentine and Craig Kauffman. Frank Gehry, who also grew up in Venice, must have known about this movement. Since 1962, I had been experimenting a good deal with fibreglass, which allows you to do everything yourself - not be dependent on anyone. I tried practically every technique before 1965, even casting. But by 1966, it had all become prehistory.

P.C.: Were these people making funk art?

J.N.: Not funk. It was a bit more formalist than that. But simple, body-coloured forms, and smooth plastics that reflected the light. There was still a real sense of the hand-finished, however. I probably discovered them in New York. I don't know if it was a case of influence or coincidence. Anyway, I felt an affinity with them.

R.V.: It was more a question of information. You were interested in these artists at a very particular point in your development.

J.N.: In 1966, I made all these connections, all these lights came on. Then there was the wind that swept through in '67, and you can imagine the rest. But my favourite sculpture had always been the Victory of Samothrace. Paradoxically, even when I was working in bronze, flight and lightness were my preferred themes. I was fascinated by those solar space ships that travel majestically into infinity powered by the sun's energy. When I was small, I'd go sailing with my dad. He'd cram all eight of us children and our mother into his tiny boat, like sardines, and then take us out to brave the squalls of Lake Champlain.

P.C.: So the development went gradually from figure to form, from the body and something essentially anthropomorphic to something abstract.

J.N.: After the anthropomorphic forms I began using cube shapes that could be dismantled like a puzzle. And also ovoid forms that could be arranged by the viewer at will. The invitation for my first exhibition, held in 1968 in Montreal, encouraged people to select modules and rearrange them.

P.C.: In 1967, there was the idea of a puzzle in these shapes, these cubes, but also the notion of space, the void between two elements. This inter-space would become important again later, during the '80s. I can see the deconstructive aspect of volume. With de-composition, the inter-space, the interstice between the two forms inevitably appears. The elements were quite close together -- not metres apart. This proximity is integral to the work: the two elements make one sculpture. The separation produces a void that allows the sculpture to exist. Meanwhile, you were moving away from natural materials towards more artificial ones.

R.V.: A participatory model could be applied here.

P.C.: In 1967-68, with the wooden sculptures but also the cubic metal ones, with their flat elements cut out of painted metal, an assemblage dynamic emerged, and with it the possibility of adapting the piece to different sites. In fact, the notion of movement made its appearance.

J.N.: The mobiles moved in the wind. One that was installed at the home of my friend Jacques Hurtubise flew off and landed on a neighbouring plot. Even mobiles were too static for me! I wanted to shape the flow of wind and water, with the participation of the spectator.

P. C.: So there was an interactive dimension… an invitation to be part of the sculpture. This reminds me a little of the kinetic artists in Europe, and of Soto's penetrable pieces.

J.N.: I'd also experimented with a labyrinth that could be assembled in different ways so as to create multiple optical illusions in various dimensions. The idea of this maze - which was created in Montreal in 1967 and shown there in '68 at Galerie 60, and then again at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in Toronto - was to disrupt space by bombarding the spectator with a multitude of contradictory visual impressions. After that I moved on to other things.

P.C.: Two more questions about this first period. You've mentioned several West Coast artists and their particular approach. They employed colour in an "artificial" way so as to give their materials a certain independence, based on colour alone, from natural references. You went from wood to metal, from metal to plastic. Plastic was, after all, the material of the '60s. One of the symbolic materials of this period was vinyl - it was the quintessential material of Pop design, and the one used by many West Coast artists. Against this backdrop, what was your relationship with Pop art and its proponents between 1958 and 1965? It was obviously a powerful force in the United States. In Quebec and Canada, the attitude seems to have been one of reaction to its proximity and suspicion. Greg Curnoe was a Canadian artist who was militantly anti-American. He went out of his way to affirm his Canadian identity. Where do you position yourself in all this?

J.N.: It was nothing to do with politics or identity. I was interested in the plasticity of forms, their reaction during the process of creation. Space itself was there to be conquered. In '68 I made the series of Inflatables, then the Canvases, and later the Actions - instant sculptures designed to highlight space and movement. To square them off, divide them up, measure them. I was trying, little by little, to capture fluidity itself.

P.C.: But coming back to Pop, what I really want to know is how important was Pop art to you as visual culture?

J.N.: Pop art was a simultaneous explosion of joy and creativity. It was also an admission that modern culture is created at the popular level and not by an intellectual elite trying to push the Renaissance notion of man's perfectibility. Today, the boundaries between the ideal and the superficial - between Mozart and rock - have been blurred. The means of cultural diffusion have been reduced to the role of harmless alibi. And Jeff Koons feels free to state, in all seriousness, that art that doesn't sell is no good! Jesus said the merchants must be driven from the temple. The temple is our consciousness. This consciousness is exposed to brainwashing from the minute we're born. Hollywood and Madison Avenue have become the educators of our children, of the whole of society. Religion and thought have been replaced by bodybuilding and health food! Even though there are so many ways to learn about the fantastic world in which we live, our children recite by heart the details of actors' lives and the latest hit songs. But they can't stand any reference to historical events. They know Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael - but they're turtles. Beethoven is a dog. History has been re-written by Walt Disney. Illiteracy is rife. Is Pop the cynical acceptance of this state of affairs?

P.C.: So you left the École des beaux-arts early in 1963 to forge your own path. At the same time, your artistic practice was developing. It was deeply rooted in a sculpture based on space, volume, matter, although it also involved colour. What shaped your intellectual development? What theoretical or poetic encounters marked you most?

J.N.: I was reading Céline, Dostoyevsky, Cendrars, Jean Rostand, Aristotle - science and philosophy, but not much on art. Much later I got really into Bachelard, but my approach has never been an intellectual one. I get a genuine physical pleasure from communion with matter that I don't get from art theory. There has to be the stimulation of exhibitions. Semantic analyses ultimately have the effect of emptying the most profound emotions of their real content.

P.C.: In Fluid Mechanics there is this idea of a fleeting movement frozen in sculpture, like the marvellous shape of ripples on water, the shape of a wave's crest that we long to capture - yet nature makes it impossible, for its very existence is in movement

J.N.: I was conscious of all this when I chose the paradoxical title of Fluid Mechanics. Behind the waves and the wind… I discovered fluidity and time, whose rhythms I analyzed in my photo Actions, like the 1971 piece Zwiiiish. A person endlessly tearing fabric or sticking poppy petals on their face. Are these strictly speaking measuring devices or sculptures? Obviously, they're closer to pataphysics than physics. The measurements obtained have never been approved by the Academy but their capacity to spark a reflection on the notion of "fluidity" nonetheless exists. Some artists can imagine (and draw) possible universes and transfers of energy, where mathematicians would be stuck with figures and graphs.

P.C.: So there is a major exploratory thread in your work that focuses on the means of instruction, assimilation and visual synthesis peculiar to different artistic experiences.

J.N.: The manipulation of matter has always been edifying. Sensuality is important too. Art is not just an intellectual object to be coldly analyzed.

P.C.: Is the idea of the inevitable alteration of form also a factor? I'm thinking of this in relation to the thermoforming of the soft inflatable pieces. The works from these series can take different shapes depending on how much they're blown up and for how long - in fact, they exist whether they're fully blown up or not inflated at all.

J.N.: The notion of transience is secondary for me. I was more interested in the oscillation of objects and space. In 1969, at my exhibition at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal many of the works were lying on the floor, right across the visitors' path. People had to either step over them or move them. I also attached a sculpture to the receptionist's telephone. Every time she answered a call, the movement of the receiver set the sculpture in motion.

P.C.: Thirty years later, with the hindsight that time inevitably brings, the general evolution of your materials seems quite unusual. You went from the hard, the tangible, the more or less traditional materials to the soft, the elastic, the malleable. In relation to the modernist sculptural tradition, your pieces are quite similar to Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, the anti-forms of Robert Morris and Barry Flanagan, although in your forms there is an element of potential movement.

J.N.: I wasn't far from these artists, although I wonder if they were not more interested in exploring the idea of sculpture per se. I don't think I took the same path as them. I feel closer to someone like Takis, or Penone, with his hand gripping the tree, or even the Bachet brothers, with their musical instrument sculptures, or Xenakis, with his Polytope.

P.C.: I don't know if we can really talk of influences. Perhaps simply encounters? Flanagan, César's compressions, this was all happening on the other side of the Atlantic. There's a family resemblance. Two very important works are the cutout canvas pieces from 1970.And we should add the works involving a performance: a man or a woman creating forms in space with a banner. These gestures simultaneously conjure the art of the kite and reflect the importance in your work of both movement and the body.

R.V.: One wonders if the figure was not making a reappearance here, and if so what it's significance might be.

J.N.: I prefer the word participation to performance… For me, it was experimenting with the manipulation of objects, of grids, of probes. We can trace it through the inflatables, the deflated, sewn, stretched and torn works, see it in the trees and the faces. Putting on a pair of pants and running. Sticking petals on a face. In '71 and '72, writing on skin.

R.V.: The volume was transformed, just like the site of the action.

P.C.: The writing on skin was perhaps a little different. It recalls a well-known performance by Dennis Oppenheim: wearing a blindfold, he redrew a drawing his son was making on the boy's back. It's not that far from body art. And you - what did you write on the body?

J.N.: There was certainly a trend. I wrote on a woman's body a poetic text expressing my liking for particular organic forms that have a modular, repetitive dimension. I wrote: "I am fascinated by… rhythmic pulsations, corn-cobs, radiators, Ss, Zs and zigzags."

P.C.: What prompted you to write this on a body, a living body that breathes and moves?

J.N.: I was bored with working with materials. Faces and bodies seemed like a new territory to explore. Since I needed "models," I began by painting my own face in all sorts of different ways. Then I continued on female bodies, starting with the text I just mentioned. I didn't think about it. Each experiment led me on. Each door opened a hundred others.

R.V.: It was thought through experimentation.

P.C.: There is practical thought, but your practice itself produced thought. It's interesting to look at it from today's perspective. Clearly, it was a specific moment that will not occur again outside that particular sequence. There are parameters running right through your work to the present that transcend its diversity and transformations. But this particular work on the female body represents a moment that was at once pivotal and entirely atypical. It will never recur.

R.V.: Yet the body was present at the beginning. The body intervenes in the sculpture. Early on, with the Labyrinth and the performances. And here sculpture intervenes, in the sense that the body becomes sculpture.

J.N.: Performance is something else - it's a kind of show. In my case, it was more of an experiment - like the Mesmerizer in the 19th century. All the participants would sit in a circle, in contact with each other and with the machine. There was also Wilhelm Reich's "orgone box." We know now that the effect was purely psychological, but it was powerful. I, too, was working with participants who were manipulating something. Drawing on a body was also an experiment, but it was definitely not a performance.

P.C.: Does this mean that for you the body is an extension of the investigation of materials, and thus a kind of extension of the practical realm?.

J.N.: The body is a loaded material. Obviously, from some points of view the female body is more interesting. It symbolizes fluidity and harmony. It is also the source of life.

P.C.: Since you are talking of materials, forms, colours and movement, I'll ask the question. The body is a material and a surface. It is also, in the context of contemporary dance, a mechanical element. People like Merce Cunningham and Alvin Nikolais worked a lot with the body's dynamics. Was this aspect of choreography or of contemporary dance of interest to you? Did you recognize it later, as an echo of your own investigations?

J.N.: I was more interested in kinetics than choreography. The participants wrestle, pulling a piece of fabric this way and that. Before 1967, my aim was to encourage people to interact with my objects. I decided to formally invite them to organized "séances." It was instant sculpture - like instant coffee. But all of a sudden the sculptures became measuring instruments, big butterfly nets, landing nets for capturing the cosmic moment, just as powerful - from the point of view of consciousness - and just as ridiculous as any religious ritual. The butterfly was the Fluid.

R.V.: Did this represent a shift in the dimension of mobility, so that it now invested the body? The body is potentially the most mobile material, but also the most ordinary. At once the most noble, because it is alive, and the most banal, because it is so accessible, so ubiquitous.

J.N.: It's the whole notion of a "work" that is upset by the intervention of the body. At the beginning, we had a block of carved marble representing movement. The Discus Thrower, for example. No one could ever make such a beautiful sculpture again. Except for Degas' ballerinas in pink tutus…

P.C.: Looking back thirty years later, we see that there were some important things happening in your work at that time: a form that moves to the point of self-destruction, and whose very essence is to produce a form that will self-destruct.

J.N.: I wasn't aiming at self-destruction. The idea's amusing, but Tinguely went further.

P.C.: It seems to me that you've often explored the possibility of the dissolution of form through movement. Of course, they are forms fixed in a system of perpetual motion, but they are still unstable.

J.N.: Instability is the expression of anxiety in the face of extinction. But the existence of the universe does not appear to be threatened. According to Hubert Reeves, the real question is why is there something rather than nothing?

P.C.: There are two types of form in the Overexpansibles[??] series- on the one hand, the air-filled elements arranged repetitively, which have an environmental dimension that can be developed ad infinitum, and on the other the flat forms. But these two types of form never seem permanently fixed.

J.N.: In 1967, thermoforming, which is so sensual, helped me discover the dynamics of the genesis of forms. This was with the Ovoids. Then I wanted to go further, to really invade space - the sculptor's reflex! And that led to the Overexpansibles[??]. But it was still too static! So I opted for vinyls hung all over the place.

R.V.: Like the inflatables. At the same time, there was a reoccupation of space, which became tighter. Were you moving then towards more fixed forms?

J.N.: These materials were like skin. Nothing was fixed any more, everything was on the point of coming to life. It was Pygmalion.

P.C.: The notion of equilibrium was introduced. There was also the element of division, as if the sculpture cut through space. Space becomes simultaneously obstacle, frontier, screen.

J.N.: The idea of the Overexpansibles[??] was to destroy the oppressive orthogonality that is imposed on us all. I tried to create sculptures that went in all directions at once. Like the canvases hung at odd angles, whose aim was to deform space but at the same time measure it.
There was the cutting-through of space, but space also had to spread everywhere, in all directions. Even if there remained only one atom in some far-off corner, not a single bit of space would be safe from the unexpected visit of some stray photon or exotic particle. I'm reminded of the arrow of time. The bow was one of the first musical instruments. It's still used this way in Amazonia. If someone fired a few notes of music into the air with a bow, will they travel around for eternity? Unfortunately not! Tragically, musical waves die out. But not photons! The waves and/or particles of light keep travelling forever. So it seems logical to say that space is everywhere. My grids are designed to take meta-measurements or capture meta-voltages. These Ubuesque ravings lead me to a conclusion: space is limitless and it is alive. I just listen to physicists, extrapolate and draw my own conclusions. Then I go back to my little studio and conduct my own investigations by puttering around with bits of string.

P.C.: You're telling us that a form under tension has an existence that goes beyond the material?

J.N.: Take the sea. It's an organism, not just a collection of individual drops of water. The cosmos is also an organism. My aim is to probe the depths of the abyss, measure the speed of light, gravity, nuclear cohesion. Don't we talk of the weight of ideas? The power of humour? The poetry of haiku?

P.C.: What materials were you using at that time?

J.N.: I love wood, it's so noble and sensual. Cold tempered steel, which attracts colour, transparency and reflection, movement, instability. These are still my favourite mateials.

R.V.: In the works from the early '80s there are various hints, a general tonality suggesting the sea.

J.N.: The colours are often symbolic. And there are also waves, rips. A blue light becomes softer beneath the surface. The piece may move if there's a breeze or if someone walks by.

P.C.: The titles of your sculptures are also significant?

J.N.: To begin with, they were called Bird-Man, or Troglodyte; then came the cubes and after the Eggs. Then there were the soft sculptures and the canvases, which had onomatopoeic names evoking the sound fabric makes when it is rubbed or torn, or when it flaps in the wind: SSRP, FFFUF, ZWIIIISH. There were always lots of Fs, Ss and Zs. They're phonemes. It was important that the title be an extension of the work and not simply related to it. I chose the names of mythical places, like the names of the moon's seas in Latin (to conjure distance), and very emotion-laden or descriptive names. Poetic metaphor makes it easier to conceptualize the flux.

R.V.: Do you consider these spatial works or autonomous objects?

J.N.: The focus isn't really geometry, or the pattern, the tapestry cartoon that could have become a two-dimensional painting. It's rather the distortion that's important. But these works are also metaphors for the fibre of cosmic space, which will become observable once we've invented the right instrument. Probably a boundless fabric, a trampoline of 10 or 12 dimensions stretching in every direction. Swimming underwater gives some idea of what it would be like.

P.C: I'm interested in this idea of fabric; your first sculptures from the '80s are not solid, opaque works that explore the density of matter. Instead, they play on the notions of translucence, transparency, the possibility of traversing space. Space, in your work, seems to be something that links the visible and the invisible. In Mare Nubium, for example, the canvas is opacified by a translucent blue. The plastic element disrupts the space without filling it completely. It reminds me of the penetrable we've already talked about that you exhibited in Montreal in 1968 - the Labyrinth. Other spectators and works could be seen through its structure of coloured plastic. So the idea of transparency was already there…

R.V.: The labyrinth was also created by the reflections of participating spectators.

P.C.: If we push this notion of fabric to the limit, we could say that there is a layering of fabrics between the body's external surface and its interior. Rather as if matter were structured so that a kind of continuum exists between the heart, the interior of the individual and the infinity of space.

J.N.: In fact, there are myriad facets and dimensions that are paradoxical and even contradictory. Transparency and opacity. Equilibrium and instability. Some works stand upright on a piece of glass. If you remove a single element, the whole thing falls apart. How does it stand upright? How does the universe stand upright? If the universe failed to hold together, there'd have be outside intervention from time to time, to construct another. And it would inevitably be shaky too, and would eventually disintegrate. The oneness of things is the only possible mechanical solution. If the universe works, it's because everything is in a state of equilibrium. Astrophysicists have made hundreds of simulations of alternative universes. And they've realized that if some of the fundamental parameters of planetary movement were altered only fractionally, everything would break down. It's not like a child's construction game.

P.C.: One could relate this idea of equilibrium, of disequilibrium, to the way movement dominates the form, both its emergence and its dissolution. I assume it was these preoccupations that led you to employ a flexible material like corrugated polyester. Even though this is an industrial material, its form seems somehow to embody the ripple of life, of matter itself, of energy.

J.N.: Polyester is a metaphor for skin, the eye. It's almost alive. It responds to any pressure. The cosmos, too, is a living being. This idea has something almost mystical about it. Some people see god as an old man, talking to us on the mountain, bringing the sacred engraved tablets. What a charming fairy-story image! All religions are anthropomorphic. As if god would be insignificant enough to resemble us. As if with our 1,400 cc of grey matter we could even begin to grasp the concept of god. Nothing precludes god and the cosmos being a single reality of which we are (temporarily) part. One thing's certain - only a principle can be immutable. Everything that exists is alive and dynamic. We know that there are such things as cosmic tides. Gravitational forces are the pulsations of this boundless "trampoline." Intuition can sometimes be illuminating. Pythagoras imagined that he heard the music of the spheres. The Hindus came up with Om, which they chant to express their oneness with cosmic energy. Scientists have measured at 2.7 on the Kelvin scale the background noise of the universe - the sound residue left over from the Big Bang. We're like tumours, parasites in the cosmic tissue. We're born there, live there, die there.

P.C.: So your view concerning all the potential elements constituting life is a syncretic one?

R.V.: Jean Noël is speaking of the cosmos. We could evoke the microcosmic level in works that fuse intuitions and the perceptual realities governed by the laws of physics.

J.N.: These questions are much more interesting than the phenomenon of the interaction between art critics and artists, which in fact reflects a refusal to come to grips with the real issues. We're distracted by issues of no importance - how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

P.C.: In this concept of energy, of a living organism, there is also the idea of a sensual approach to the world. In some of your titles - Azure Me, for example - there's the suggestion of a caress, a kind of opening up. The titles you choose open the way to the command of these elements in a dynamic (in the full sense of the word) - but a sensual dynamic. As if all at once the elements' energy possessed its own fleshly potential. As if everything were composed of body and skin.

J.N.: Azure Me! Azure is the sky, the sea, a tender caress, just as it's the horror of the abyss that is death. Which is why we have all these gurus promising immortality. It's an inexhaustible market! But like someone once said: Where do dead people go? To the same place as all the people who were never born.

P.C.: As well as the various materials used for anthropomorphic or plant forms, we see the simultaneous operation of several dimensions that are rooted in a presence, a kind of body that can take multiple forms. Your work contains a number of references to the half-human, half mythical figure of the mermaid.

J.N.: …which represents the elements. The Greeks didn't believe in their mythology. They didn't take it as its face value, but saw it as symbolic of nature's tensions, human impulses, and angst in the face of life and death. De Chirico spoke a good deal of the Greek gods. In the forests of Greece, we sense the presence of these gods.We hear the echo of the philosophers' voices. We become aware that rocks are alive, trees are alive. In Jean Rey's novel Malpertius, a Belgian taxidermist goes on an expedition to Greece to hunt gods. His idea is to bring them back and stuff them. The major religions have attempted to describe god and impose their view of him on others, with extreme violence. Animists have been condemned as primitives. But they understood that there is a spirit in nature.

P.C.: As if the elements were the incarnation of the figure of desire, a polymorphous desire?

J.N.: I don't know what desire that could be, other than the desire for life in the face of death.

P.C.: I was referring to the impulses.

J.N.: A life impulse.

P.C.: I mean a sort of fundamental sexual impulse. I wonder if there is not in your work a sort of formal vitalism that is the opposite of a tragic vision. You are on the side of a certain lightness, even of the giddiness induced by ecstasy - there's a degree of loss of self. I sometimes sense this dimension in your work. A drive towards loss of self that can end in the dissolution of life. It recalls the myth of Penthesilea, where the lover kills the object of his love. The power of often love destroys its very object. Sometimes an excess of energy can produce the opposite of its constructive rationale. It's a dual rationale of growth and dissolution. I remember you spoke to me once of "the dream of being able to give form and figure to the flow of a river's water and of a swimmer within it, of being able to instil in the immobility of a form the continuous movement of the human and water elements." These two energies go together or oppose one another. As with Robert Morris or Barry Flanagan, who make sculpture with entirely antinomic materials, your paradox lies in the dream of making the ephemeral endure.

J.N.: The illusion of endurance is reassuring. For me, each sculpture is a puzzle, a riddle. Not a certitude, but a question.

R.V.: Your goal is to capture an instant of these tensions.

J.N.: We are tightrope-walking mediums. The exact spot that creates the tension isn't always obvious. It is also possible to simultaneously say something and its opposite.

P.C.: A little like the emergence of a figure, the emergence of matter or form.

J.N.: I don't wish to be trapped in either one or the other. Nature or artifice? Words are artificial, but they describe natural phenomena. One must also try to look behind the screen, beneath the surface.

P.C.: Perhaps it is this that distinguishes your preoccupations from those of the deconstructivists (from Carl André to Support-Surface).

J.N.: Picasso and the Constructivists exploded the unequivocal vision that predominated and made us see that reality is fragmented and multi-faceted. Naum Gabo, who is not mentioned often, was probably one of the greatest.

R.V.: What you say is full of poetic connotation, intuitions concerning nature and the laws of physics; and yet at the same time, almost contradictorily, there seems to be a desire for refinement, lightness, a process of subtraction in the form itself.

J.N.: A unified theory is every scientist's dream. There's definitely a simple explanation underlying this complicated mechanism. In the '90s, with the Hydrodynamix, I tried to let the form construct itself, with a minimum of intervention. To be simply the instrument of its evolution. I began with a first skin, and then a second. Each new skin created a new tension that pulled the sculpture in a different direction and created yet further tensions, and so on until I had three or four skins, which I fixed when the form was complete. It was a bit as if I was playing tennis with the form. You hit the ball, the form sends it back - ten, twenty times, like the same echo that is distinct and different with each rebound of its endless reverberations. Finally, it was almost a dialogue between me and the sculpture. It responded to each of my appeals, and the result was unpredictable.

P.C.: We can sometimes observe a rather surprising element in your sculpture - a synopsis of landscape, a particular instant of the universe, but also something natural, organic. I'm thinking of particularly of a small white sculpture, which seems a bit like a prosthesis, an extension of the body. The projective, intuitive part of the process anticipates to a degree a form that the constructive part of the process will modify. There's a dual logic - the logic of fabrication and the logic peculiar to the material itself. This duality thus produces something that is between the determined and the unpredictable.

J.N.: These sculptures are harmonious, they develop in a specific way. Like all natural forms, their structure is determined by the laws defined during the Renaissance by Fibonacci. These laws determine the intervals between the buds of a plant. Mario Merz has talked about this. Fibonacci was a medieval mathematician from Pisa whose work led to the discovery that a branch always grows at a particular distance from its neighbours - taking account of the space available. Fibonacci's scientifically calculated projections are almost identical to the golden mean, the divine proportions defined by the Greek philosophers. The conclusion is that the sculptor doesn't really create form: he is simply the midwife who delivers nature of a new form, from among all the possible ones. If you fill a piece of fabric with liquid, you see it taking a new shape as the weight of the liquid drags the material down. And when you halt the flow, an unpredictable form becomes fixed. The windsock allows us to see the invisible currents running through space. The wind is a perfect metaphor for the density of space. What could be more magical than a yacht in full sail that grabs and harnesses the wind, while its keel remains stable beneath? It's like scaling a liquid mountain. It's easy to imagine how the cosmos is alive with all kinds of giga-currents moving in every direction. And how it all maybe forms a living being. We exist like parasitic tumours in its flesh. It's another anthropomorphic image, of course, but rather different from the old man on his cloud listening to lyre music! But maybe we should get back to these juxtapositions of two-dimensional planes.

R.V.: They're reliefs, bas-reliefs, mostly made of cardboard.

P.C.: They're not always cardboard. The extreme fragility of the anchorings strikes me as interesting. They're held with needles, tiny spots of glue, they hang by a thread. They form a kind of volumetric sketchbook.

R.V.: The word "hanging" really takes on its full meaning here.

P.C.: They're sketches that exist in practice as volumes.

J.N.: From a particular viewpoint, each sculpture appears different, like a volume.

P.C.: The anchorings of these works can be likened to the needles Picasso used to hold certain elements in his collages. It meant he could place them, without necessarily fixing them permanently. I find this very interesting. I was thinking one could imagine a kind of wall, one that would be a work surface on which one could hang essays, thoughts, sensations - a fusion of reflection, experimentation and verification.

J.N.: Like the patterns used in dress design.

P.C.: Speaking of dress design - assemblage, cutting-out, collage- reminds me of paper cutouts, the paper cutouts of Matisse. They were all about these notions of collage and joining. What will be fixed? What will link it all up? What will reveal how everything joins together? When you're moving from a plane to a space to a volume, it's in the realm of assemblage and collage that things become fixed.

J.N.: Some of these works have changed form many times. The needles, the spots of glue, mean that I can dismantle and reassemble them until I've found the ideal balance.

R.V.: What about the colour. Does it come at the same time? After? Before?

J.N.: There's no rule, but the colours represent something. An element, an emotion, an energy. Water. Air. Foliage.

P.C.: There aren't many bright colours. They often have a quality reminiscent of watercolour - unsaturated colour. There's a certain fluidity, always a certain transparency, a marked openness to light; English translation by Judith Terry, Montréaleven when the colours are shiny and have a refractive quality, they allow the light to pass through - except in the large sculptures, where the colours are opaque.

J.N.: Nothing is finished, definite. The colour is the mist through which we perceive the objects. It's like an aura. The objects emit all sorts of different lights. From each viewpoint they exhibit a different and unexpected personality.

R.V.: Do they create different atmospheres, like music? Nocturnes, for example.

J.N.: Many of the "atmospheres" have to do with the moon and the ocean.

R.V.: You nevertheless take great delight in colour?

J.N.: Why deny oneself such a sensual element, one that brings such pleasure? Some artists spend their days masochistically producing things that are terribly dull. Not me

P.C.: René has said that there is a lightheartedness to your practice, and your work is obviously not marked by melancholy. We have a sense of conscious happiness.

R.V.: There is some tension.

J.N.: The real magic is the spinning of the atoms. We still can't really explain it, but there's no trick.

P.C.: I would say, a little more cautiously, that the object of your explorations is happiness, the enigma of the exposure of things to light, to our gaze, to their own dynamic.

J.N.: My hope, every day, is to be amazed by my works.

P.C.: How do you know when a work is successful, or when it's not worth saving?

J.N.: When I can look at them for years with pleasure, then they're successful. I dismantle the ones I don't like to try out new ideas. They become fragments of meta-coherence, scribbled at random. One day, these fragments will come together in the great saga of the Fluid.

Interview with Jean Noël conducted by Philippe Cyroulnik director of Centre d'art contemporain, Montbéliard, and René Viau, art critique, writer and curator of the exhibition on March 27, 2001, at the artist's studio, Cité Griset, Paris 11e

English translation by Judith Terry, Montréal

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