Olivier de Sagazan, Gareth Pugh, Nick Knight, Roly Porter, Jounji ku
Originally trained as a biologist, Olivier de Sagazan turned to painting and sculpting with the ever-present idea of questioning organic life. From his passion to give life to matter came the idea for him to cover his own body with clay in order to observe the resulting “object”. This experiment gave rise to the creation of a solo, Transfiguration, in which we see a man gradually disfiguring himself with clay into a kind of monster. This half-man, half-beast is searching beneath his masks for who he is.
June 1998:
I am in my workshop. I have been trying for weeks to give life to a sculpture. Suddenly an idea comes to me: I want to immerse myself in the matter – that way, I will be sure to make a lively structure. I place
a camera in front of me, surround myself with material I use to sculpt and paint, and then I begin. My head is a pedestal, I work blindly, with my internal perception as my only guide. I cover my face with a layer of clay, then make a first sculpted face, which I erase rapidly. I try again and again. These masks are moveable and transformed at the stroke of the hand. Everything is touch here: my hands explore my modelled face, and my faces feel the deformation of the clay. It spreads across my chest and my limbs and I feel my body in a way I have never experienced before. What guides me is also what I am looking for: this inner perception that constitutes selfhood. What I have recorded fascinates me: I see half- men, half-beasts, between African fetish masks and Francis Bacon’s meat heads. Despite myself, the painter is also a painting and this living painting is also a dance.
I have repeated and amplified this experience, this performance, with other actors and dancers on stage. The sight of naked bodies covered in clay, deformed by it, and turned into worm-like creatures is startling to both the dancers and spectators. I am currently working this vision into a theatre piece. Clay forces you to improvise and take risks: masks magnify presence and at the scale of the body or bodies, this presence becomes truly impressive. This practice carries us to unknown terrain, close to primitive dance and trance. There is no such thing as inert matter. All matter is sensitive, alive.
I am matter; you and I are Earth!
I love works of art, whether in painting or dance, where traces of the body are visible: hesitations, failures, and those that are lost in acts of folly. These traces speak of life and the mystery of its origins. To be alive is to feel lost. All the rest is a pose, or lies we tell ourselves. We have all felt this over the last year and the waking nightmare we lived through in the flesh will mark us forever: prohibited touch, distorted faces, banned meetings. May Venice, city of masks and carnivals, be the place where we truly feel each other again.
Olivier de Sagazan

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