Georges Jeanclos - Elsa Sahal

In the rooms of the Hôtel Dieu a dialogue develops between two sculptors from different generations, Georges Jeanclos and Elsa Sahal. They met at the Beaux-arts in Paris, where Jeanclos was Sahal’s teacher. Their shared love of the land gives rise to two very different bodies of work: one is figurative, meditative, symbolist and even mystic, the other organic, colourful and whimsical or disturbing. Small figures on one side and large formats on the other show the contrasting facets of these two highly personal approaches to sculpture, the parallels and tensions between which are brought out by  this juxtaposition.
 
In “L’Atelier”, Georges Jeanclos described the physical aspect of making his work, handling “ten kilos of soft clay,” “obliquely striking” the ground in order to make plaques: “The ground resonates and the earth stretches. I have to calculate to the nearest centimetre this way with the ground that allows you to stretch the material, to make visible this memory of the earth, in which each action is recorded and memorised, to draw out memory, remorse from the very depths of matter. All the unconscious, filtered acts reappear as a result of the effort.” This effort is hard to imagine, for the sculptures have a striking fragility about them, due to the artist’s work on the plaque and their hollow core, which sometimes causes them to collapse in the process of execution, but also to the motifs (urns, sleepers, lovers,
children, etc.) that appear, with the material they emerge from constantly threatening to swallow them up again. Grounded in the universal history of art, Jeanclos’s work, informed by his Jewish culture, is a response to the great trauma of the Second World War. Hence the impression that, through this titanic work and its very delicate results, he is trying for a form of reparation. As he wrote:  “Earth below, I am trying to raise you up towards  this world above, that I do not know.”  What Elsa Sahal recalls from Jeanclos’s teaching  are the drawing sessions at the Louvre where he taught his students to “see the harmony of forms” and “invent and, above all, not repeat things.” She also remembers him directing the research workshop at the Manufacture de Sèvres in 1970s, working to renew the art of ceramics, which she has explored from a contemporary viewpoint since the early 2000s. This medium suits her desire to make “big” sculptures and to “pit my body against something that metamorphoses” and at the same time carries the memory of the energy of the action. Such  are the most apparent characteristics of her sculptures, which bring into play indefinable yet evocative forms (varied facets of biological life), which seem to be caught up in a process of constant transformation, driven by  an undeniable vital force. Sexual allusions are frequent, as in the world of Elmar Trenkwalder, but with one major difference: these vulvas and penises have a very different resonance when shaped by a woman’s hand. Then  there is also the artist’s scatological and deliberately sophomoric humour, her toying with the distinction  between good and bad taste in her use of colour. All these are challenges to the conventional ideas of sculpture  that she is constantly questioning.