Jeanne Revay: An artist’s sleight of hand
Jeanne Revay just turned 33, the age of prophecies and epiphanies. A visit to her Paris studio can offer such an epiphany. That of a formidably gifted hand, that of a young woman with a surgeon’s obsession for the hand and the lines it can conjure up out of ashes.
Of those 33 years, Jeanne has lived 25 of them just across the street from the Rodin Museum in Paris. She has grown up visiting her neighbor’s accumulation of works in plaster, in marble, and in bronze. Such daily proximity is enough to trigger a destiny. To become an artist. And Jeanne is certainly not the first one to be enraptured with Rodin. She does admit a secret kinship with Camille Claudel and her daring lyricism, perhaps even less constrained than that of Rodin.
The Hand
For Jeanne, the epiphany happened when discovering a hand-sculpted by Rodin, the Hand of God creating Adam and Eve. A marble hand like a “mise en abyme” of the natural tool of the artist, since the representation of the hand, can always be seen as the self-portrait of the artist at work. And in the history of classical art, this highly complex 3D structure of the hand had always been one of the parts, along with the eyes, that the workshop kept for the master. Rubens could very well let an assistant deal with the still life in the foreground, let another one take up the fragments of architecture in the background and yet another paint the heavy draperies… but the hands of the heroes pressing and grabbing, the hands of the kings and queens holding and patting, those were only for his brush to paint.
No wonder the hand of the artist at work should welcome the visitor to Jeanne’s studio. It rings like a gesture of defiance and the secret admission of a little girl’s worship for the great artists in her syllabus. A video, simply entitled Hand, is eerily slow. A hand is dancing with a stone. Literally. Both tied up in the nylon of a stoking. We are witnessing the slow-motion choreography of God’s creation. Rodin had shown her the hand of God holding the block of marble from which Adam and Eve emerge. Jeanne’s hand shows this very Genesis in slow motion. But the manly hand of Rodin’s God is replaced here by a woman’s long-fingered hand which barely seems to touch the stone but is able to hold it in midair through mysterious fluids. A material prone to trigger fantasies, the nylon adds to the ambivalence of the movement. Are we peering at a dance or a caress, a ballet or brutal bondage?
This extended hand is merging with the object it is holding. It seems to mimic the manly posture of another master of sculpture. In his iconic video of 1968*, Richard Serra was extending his hand horizontally like this in a vain attempt to catch bits of metal in their fall. Jeanne’s hand is deriding those manly hands of all-powerful creators. She is reenacting this choreography of earthly attraction, only to get the better of it as the stone is kept floating in midair. A sleight of hand really.
But let us prod even further this opposition with Richard Serra. To the vertical fall of the metal, she opposes the horizontal weightlessness of the stone dancing at her fingertips; to the hand of the man which strives to seize, the soft strokes of her woman’s hand; to the heavy lead, the nimble nylon. Even in the choice of materials which the hands cannot hold, the two artistic gestures, although similar in their fixed shot, are set apart. To the imperious movement, to the impact of metal, Jeanne substitutes the nylon enveloping elasticity at her fingertips. There is a women’s sisterhood to be found with another Californian artist, Senga Nengudi who made a point in the 1970’s of answering the orthogonal angles of the minimalist machos with her sculptures of nylon stockings tied to the wall.
Another choreography of the wrapped-up body is the subject of Kairos, the perfect moment. A still shot focuses on the neck of a woman clothed in a transparent jacket and whose heavy dark hair falls on the shoulders. She is a modern caryatid whose swaying hair will belong to the one who can grab them, for this is the image of the Kairos for the Greeks, the moment that one must seize, the tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune**. Yet again, the hand is called upon, not to catch the falling piece of metal but to hold the girl’s hair dancing on her shoulders.
The hand of the artist is everywhere in Jeanne’s large-scale drawings. One can trace the artist’s fingerprint in the ash of the powder charcoal she has used and then rubbed out and scraped at the surface of the Canson paper.
The big tondos (190cm x 150cm) display an almost biological vibration. The fingertips, the fleshy side of the hand, the kneaded rubber have scrubbed the soot of the charcoal. And from this vegetal ash the buds of a black bouquet spring forth. A Tondo. That’s an unusual format in contemporary drawing as it conjures up images of the Holy families and large-scale compositions of the high renaissance in Florence. It does give these drawings the scale of large celestial maps.
In the more modest formats of the chalk drawings, one can decipher the same light rubbing of the hand. The traces here are those of ivy leaves whose fine lines could be those of the palm or the minute details of synapses. The lines have an astonishing precision. A surgeon must have drawn these. Or a geographer. The white chalk powder registers an imaginary topography on the black paper. In a metaphor of the photo negative, the shapes, the network of meandering lines or the lighter granular areas look like nighttime aerial photographs of unknown foreign territories.
The artist does not so much accumulate as remove and rub out in order to create voids. In another series that brings a rare blooming of color in a radically graphic œuvre, the same technique of the rubbed-out chalk powder brings strikingly different effects. The powder blue of the pastel looks as tender as an Umbrian sky in a fresco by Piero against the deep blacks of the charcoals. And in those drawings, the rubber and the palm of the hand have even lightened up the sky and inflated the round atmospheric shapes of those cumulus clouds. The blue recedes through them like the azure of the firmament glimpsed at through the clouds of a stormy sky. Jackson Pollock could obtain those effects of depth by the mere contrasting of colors. Thus, in The Deep of 1953***, one of his most mysterious later works, a dark crevice seems to open up underneath the white drippings.
This motif of the white veins on the black background whose vibrations the drawing seems only to have captured, are to be found in another mesmerizing video. An ostrich feather, or is it some large tropical leaf, is convulsed every two seconds and then returns to its heraldic and serene beauty. The very title Hystérie (Hysteria), points to the imperious throb, the stroboscopic flash of white dissolving in the dead of night. The lines now dissolve into sheer white light out of the dark. Hysteria, which has for so long been tagged a woman’s disorder is made a rallying cry here, in the form of this fidgety feather…
*Richard Serra, Hand catching lead (1968)
** William Shakespeare, Julius Cesar, IV, 3.
*** Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.