By Pier Giorgio Balocchi.
I have been attending the Nicoli workshop for many years. Carlo was not even engaged then and so Francesca was still to come... and it was Signora Franca (Francesca’s grandmother) who ran everything with an iron hand from that delightful little desk where Francesca now works.
Sculptors came and went, as they do, in the usual chaos that seems to distinguish the real places where sculpture is made. We youngsters were more or less benevolently watched over and endured, except “when the masters arrived” and Poncet, in particular. Then the whole workshop would be smarten up and even the marble dust seemed to settle down and “take on a special light” in the splendor of Antoine’s works, which loomed up over between our more modest creations, and in the midst of the whispered stories, were ready to be shipped to important and far-flung destinations.
Now, years later, Poncet has once again created “at Nicoli’s” a group of sculptures of outstandingly high quality (and Francesca recounts their history in her contribution in the following pages). A serene master, confident in his talent, Antoine Poncet has never ceased to be active, giving us works in marble which lie outside the fashions and always have a solid base of operations in the traditional workshops of the Apuan Alps.
Throughout his life Antoine Poncet has continued to accumulate successes without the least overemphasis, in fact much of the time with a certain placidity. In 1993 he was made a member of the Institut de France and later became president of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. His first appearance at the Venice Biennale dates from 1956. His monumental works, with their lucid, elegant abstract vocabulary, are found in leading art collections around the world, from the Fondation Gianadda in Switzerland to the Open-Air Museum of Hakone in Japan, the park of Stanford University in California and, closer to home, the Centre Pompidou in his beloved Paris. Since the 1970s he has been represented in New York by Nathan Cummings, Slatkine and Weintraub, but it was his rapid acceptance and established reputation in the Middle and Far East that made this Swiss-French artist a typical and even precocious representative of the globalized world. He attended a historic symposium in Japan in 1963 and the following year the Japanese star-architect Kenzo Tange adopted his work for the Kyoto Foundation. In 1967 he scored another success by placing a major work in the Swiss embassy in Beijing.
All national borders are fated to collapse in a more or less distant future. This slow but inexorable process of unification of the human race is assisted by art which, like music, it is a universal language that anticipates the future. From the very beginning abstract art skimmed over all specific differences, abandoning the visual representation of the real world to gaze directly into the ether of forms that are, by definition, drawn from the space-time circumstances of real phenomena, wholly stripped of individual qualities and properties. Abstract forms are derived from a region of the spirit common to all, hence universal.
Certain close harmonies between peoples are inexplicable in words. The architect of the pyramid of the Louvre, I. M. Pei, is Chinese. He related the golden age of Ancient Egypt to French classicism. Like the great patron of the arts of the 21st century, the beautiful and enlightened Sheikha Mozah, he is an associate member of the Académie Française. The Académie is descended from the 17th-century tradition of cultural institutions with a universal vocation, intended to foster discussion and convergence between individual developments in science, literature and the arts, because culture is a powerful seed that rightly and skillfully breaks down the meanness and limitation inherent in an excessive concentration on one’s own backyard. This idea, born in the modern age in the heart of cultivated and international Europe, continued to develop until, after World War I, it led to the revolutionary project of the League of Nations, the original nucleus of the United Nations. This is now more than ever the key to the 21st century and to the third millennium which has just begun.
From the very start, the experiments of the Abstract artists, prophets of the imminent global convergence, were driven by a similar impulse towards the universal. But it was only with the generation of Antoine Poncet that the code of Abstractionism entered its golden age, with its most solid and convincing achievements. Just after the watershed of the first three quarters of the 20th century, it generated a kind of classicism nurtured by exchanges of experiences between artists from different backgrounds and different origins fostered by cultural institutions, prizes and private corporations that were active socially and culturally. If the pioneers of Abstract Art conducted their first experiments almost secretly in the Abstract and Dada schools, almost as subversives, in the early decades of the 20th century, when the movement reached the United States, Abstract Expressionism retained that impatient energy typical of the young. In Pollock, for example, the unconscious derivation of the automatic gesture did not lead to the most felicitous aniconic Surrealism that was to be practiced by European artists, born a generation later. His adventurous works were restless and turbulent. He sought to set down on canvas, without filters or censorship, the stream of consciousness poured out drop by drop in dribbled pigment. With Hans Arp, who was Poncet’s direct mentor, we find a true openness. He almost immediately repressed the taste for provocation, and also the political rancor that had driven the early Abstract artists to disturb viewers with an eagerness to instill the awakening of a critical consciousness. Over the years he smoothed to crystal clarity the unconscious source of certain concretions of matter, no longer sketches or tangles of emotion but powerful forms. We feel this is the maturity of Abstractionism in all its fullness, its successful poetry, a spontaneous germination of nature.
There were no tremors in around 1975. Finally the vocabulary of Abstract Art emerged from all uncertainty and gave birth to biomorphic sculpture, so sensuous in orthodox Surrealists such as the Cuban sculptor Cardenas. With Poncet this artistic language attains an ideal pinnacle of beauty and elegance, since he clearly understands the patterns of inspiration and also their moral and aesthetic risks. In this respect he resembles his Italian contemporary Signori. On the one hand he fears complacency and the pure rhetoric of a style that chases itself continuously, without ever overreaching itself, and on the other he steers clear of the continuous, extenuating overstepping of an imaginary line that signals audacity as its objective. Gimmickry renews nothing; it offers nothing more than a sequel of scandals to which we are already anesthetized. In the middle ground lies the uncompromising striving to attain a model of rigor and integrity by raising to the highest degree the dynamic lines of a form which is born soft in clay and gradually develops its own character, its fine balance of forces. From the feminine fullness of the curves, from the swellings of nature and pleasure, emerge soaring trajectories, sharp vectors indicating the natural development of a movement as of a breath, the deep structure that lends significance to and underpins the sensuousness of the naked and still amorphous material. Moral rigor and aesthetic indulgence. If a form is created, and is not doomed to a destiny of ruin and dispersal, it inevitably attains an equilibrium, a natural aplomb. In sculpture the axis is like the spine of a harmonious body; in a moral sense the axis confers character, personality. A miracle: the birth of a style. Although supported by an undeniable vigor, rigidity is alien to it as a matter of taste. And like the Orientals, it knows that in order not to snap one has to be flexible, like a reed. An indolence of temperament does no harm; understatement is the key word. At the dawn of the 21st century Poncet continued to work in China, introduced by personal contacts and the dense network of established international relations. And a certain affinity of character became the source of his success. Be discreet, pass unnoticed, but make a breach and pierce even the thickest walls by the force of inertia, like water, through the mild, persistent, stubborn action of one who has calm and almost nonchalance on his side. Beware of being too eager; never force your hand. Banish the kind of recipe that might work when making political speeches on television, in the entertainment industry or pornography. It has no appeal in the most influential courts of Europe and overseas. Poncet traversed with a stealthy step a troubled and sorrowing century, too devoted to introspective analysis and social ills, which saw a succession of almost all movements in Paris, down to the Situationists and Post-Structuralist philosophers who attacked Freud, Lacan and Marx who as time passed by became to be considered in turn as ulterior laces to liberation and freedom. From the purists of International Abstractionism he absorbed a hard ethical lesson that guided him without jolts beyond the sirens of relativistic nihilism.
Like Moore and Arp, Poncet continues to embed artistic creation in an inner measure inspired by terrible and solemn words like intellectual honesty, words irrelevant in an age devoted to fashions that are all the more spectacular the more ephemeral they are, in unique and incredible conditions of impermeability for one who works with the young, extraneous to the vulgarity of television, unscathed by the vices of the society of the spectacle, so accurately foreseen by Guy Debord in 1964. A successful artist whose company is much sought after in the beau monde of Paris, in the royal palaces of Sheikha Mozah in Qatar, in the highest echelons of the Chinese bureaucracy in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as in the home of the important French businessman Marc de la Charrière, the major shareholder in Fitch, the international credit rating company. An almost unique presence, combining a rare sweetness of manner with the essentiality as his mission.
|
|
