Robert Clévier – à propos des “ corps ”, lead pencil and pastels, 1994-97. Interview with Nathalie Gruska-Flornoy, September 11, 2024.

N.G.F. – What would you say today about the works brought together for this new exhibition, in which we see a succession of very different moments in just three years?
Can you describe the circumstances – why, in other words, did you draw like this in 1995, and why these graphic works entitled “the body”?

R.C. – The context. My concern led me to ask myself the following question: did our civilization still allow us to be ourselves, so to speak, in the company of our bodies, with our bodies…? Where were we with this touching? The “body” had all but disappeared from the purported summits of art and art history; that was where their work was, so well conducted that the exhibitions presented as the most remarkable – let’s remember, for example, those of the American modernists, post-modernists and abstract expressionists of the 1940s-70s, Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman, Pollock, Motherwell… Sam Francis and the exponents of automatism – seemed to me like funeral ceremonies, rituals of painless yet insignificant evacuation of both the “body” and the European arts, as a provisional conclusion to their dismemberments.
Our practices thus expunged, with nothing left to show about reality – reality, the first to have been shunned, since the turn of the century! -we were left with the task of examining in minute detail the degrees of condemnation that had befallen us. Didn’t Clément Greenberg claim to have “put Cézanne in his place, for theoretical inadequacy”? Saying something about pure sensations, wrapping our nothingness in hypertrophied visions would be enough to ensure our survival; all we had to do was follow in the firemen’s footsteps.
Our era was buzzing with these protoplasmic vertigoes; of course, the main character in this Puritan opera of the subject-object relationship was “the body”. Some scholars spoke of the “body of painting”; generally speaking, would picture-paintings soon take over all possible bodies?
You ask me, I try to name the anguish, sadness and incredulity that never ceased to pursue me; my works showed me figures of “subsets”, composites of organs, “human bodies” that held, slumped half-standing, only in median positions in equally altered expanses, combined at the end of uncertain “incorporations” with quasi-objects (or agents of incorporation, or incarnation? ); the two considered together made plots and prostheses. I tried to take one step at a time, to mend, unstitch and leave.

N.G.F. – Why these prostheses?

R.C. – Today, our words speak for themselves. I knew little or nothing then; I watched plots weave, and sketches of prostheses generate the quantum of chaos needed to define them. Working was, and is, the place where I hoped to become less deceptive, less erroneous, more deluded; I expected this daily exercise to reveal other possibilities… in the early 90s, I was looking for a “body” and saw ghosts appearing, then ghosts haunted by an anteriority, a kind of greedy nothingness that shattered forms.
If I’d understood the situation of art, where we weren’t, would I have drawn like that? Stubborn for twenty years, I only asked, or visually put back to work, one question: where do I stand? To draw was to examine all the scales falling from this question, and in a way to go back to it.

N.G.F. – Was it “where do I stand”, or “where does the world stand”?

R.C. – My discipline, first of all; it was in the light of, or even under the gaze of this discipline, of its long and rich history, to which I belonged, that this questioning could be carried out; that was my family, which didn’t just include artists; in my eyes, there was much more to it than the arts and aesthetics.

N.G.F. – Who is?

R.C. – The philosophies that, in particular, linked aesthetics with ethics.

N.G.F. – Did you share your concerns with friends or acquaintances?

R.C. – These exchanges stirred them up before they blurred them. However, in 1992, I was given the opportunity to lift this horizon, the declensions of which were sung by many of my colleagues. Julien Green agreed to work with me on the original edition, accompanied by my prints, of an unpublished manuscript entitled “Dionysos”, written in 1933. This four-handed collaboration was a timely opportunity to revisit some of the questions I’d mentioned a moment ago. Transported to the landscape between the two world wars, I had the opportunity to renew my previously held view of the European roots of American modernism. I also reread Proust and Kafka, Musil and “Roads to Nowhere”.
In addition to a fluted song to the glory of ancient anatomy, Green offered a dark, frenetic, heavy and sadly carnal interpretation of Greek myth, and the most disappointing Dionysus.
Two surprises governed my choices.
The first was the moment chosen by the author to put an end to sixty years of oblivion, or misguidance of this text, and to publish it precisely then, in 1993. I could see Apollonian beauty shattering on my boards with the last fireflies of the Renaissance; if Green chose this moment, was it that in his eyes our civilization, powerless to form a universal hope, was condemned to produce, before weakened European populations, the simulacrum of an equivocal, perverse spring?
The second concerned the powerlessness of the arts to avert catastrophe; Green’s language, his poetics, from flamboyance to incandescence, certainly underlined this powerlessness, but it was to charge all the arts far more seriously; “Dionysus” spoke of the complicity of the arts with the most deleterious powers of destruction; the only springtime that could be encountered was acceptable only insofar as it promised to increase the withering of the city that had placed its hope in it. As the century drew to a close, what about us, the so-called springtime of the arts – was it “worse than wars” that we had to prepare for?
I proposed the lead mines you see; they were rejected (and put away in boxes for 30 years, extra if I may say so); the trouble never left me; I moved forward in a mixture of thick fog and equally precarious aesthetic intuition; I engraved not my studies but images that could, under any circumstances, only be received as images-operators of consent, perfections, half-viatic half-idols.

N.G.F. – Between 1995 and the end of 1997, your style underwent a series of radical changes.

R.C. – The verb “to break” belongs to modernism, which says “ruptures” to ennoble its views, to clothe them in a cloak of scientificity. Will we come to blows with this ideology, with the very weapon that ensures its prosperity?
The coexistence of objects, for example, of different space-time figures, and hence of differences, was the focus of my attention. So, we’re back to the Greek model of beauty, of the “body” based on taking perfect parts from imperfect bodies, and assembling them a posteriori, all differences and discontinuities masked. Around 1995, I observed this model of the body-prosthesis constructed by “integrations” completing its glorification as it disintegrated, showing, hollowing out and exciting as wounds the collages or “inclusions” that traditions had skillfully concealed.
Today, it seems to me that the studies you will be presenting deal first and foremost with the question of differences, not in terms of a “whole” or coherent idea, but in terms of an otherness, an irreducible difference. This possibility, if it is indeed the case, is what I was hoping for.

N.G.F. – Finally, for the title of this exhibition, you propose “habeas corpus?

R.C. – … so as not to lose sight of this aspect of the context; I was born under Roman law, at a time when the owner and rentier of myself and my body was the State; it was worth a chair, or a dog, in the eyes of the owners of this little business, my progenitors. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was clear to everyone that, beyond the turpitudes in which the public powers were rolling, it was the State itself that was being drained of its last liquid volumes, even though the evolution of the law had already granted me the right to succeed my parents in the possession of the business.
I was drawing; what was at stake, what object for what subject? what or who, who and what? Bodies?”