The Art of Myth PIERRE-YVES LE DUC
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Transcript of The Art of Myth PIERRE-YVES LE DUC
PIERRE-YvES LE DUC
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.
William Wordsworth
SACRED PORTAL
Almost two years ago, my husband Dahlan and I
went to the studio of Pierre-Yves le Duc in
Naples, Italy as a courtesy to see a friend of a
friend and ended up staying most of the day,
mesmerized by the work.
They look like angels, birds, bodies being
crucified. They look like yoni. They are white on
white; they are black on white, white on black.
They look like the explosion of Vesuvius; they are
phalluses from heaven entering the volcano,
and they are holy brains as well.
Honora Foah
SACRED PORTAL
The Visions of Pierre-Yves le Duc
In Pierre-Yves’ studio, what struck
me, besides the sheer beauty of
the work, was how the figures,
how the things he painted and
drew felt so accurate. That is,
they corresponded to how my
body feels—not what I see, but
what I feel kinesthetically.
The process by which Pierre-Yves
creates the paintings is laborious,
exacting work. From the initial
calligraphic gesture drawing, he
paints a negative many times
larger, which preserves both the
spontaneous line and gives
weight and importance to the
negative space, which in this
case is usually the main corpus—
literally—as the white space is
usually the body. “The white
gives the invisible a certain
amount of tangibility,” he says.
This gives the negative space
weight, especially in the
paintings where the line itself is
then left as raw linen canvas.
For Pierre-Yves, this is his way of
emphasizing the body as light.
If the answer is infinite light, why do we sleep in the
dark?
Paul Simon
Even as babies, we
are mesmerized by
the light, by
movement of light.
Many of us retain this
fascination all of our
lives. Le Duc is one. I
asked him about his
childhood because I
wondered how he
came by the ability to
feel his own body and
translate to something
visual. The whole
aspect of being a
human being who
can inhabit one’s own
skin seems to be
leaking from human
capacity as
apparently our
Western children
spend almost no time
whatsoever in nature.
In fact, le Duc did
spend a lot of time in
the woods by himself,
or drawing by himself
because he was a
lonely child who did
not find it easy to fit
with other people.
Here now with this
work, there is the rowing toward humanity,
rowing toward love, that perhaps in the
beginning was not so readily given.
Le Duc as a person drawn to light, has made
work which resonates with many aspects of the
world from the sexual to the cosmic because
one is drawn through his admiring eye, by his
desire to learn to love. This desire is somehow
visible on the canvas and it pulls us through the
portal of the image. The loving does the work—
for him as an artist sweating it out 10 hours a day,
and for us, for whom he has made a trail by the
heat of his own desire.
So why isn’t le Duc’s
work pornography?
Because everything
about it, not the least
of which is the sheer
effort and tedious
amount of work it
takes to make it,
speaks to the desire to
be with the
foundational forces of
life. Rilke, in his Letters
to a Young Poet, says
that he had to leave
the church because it
refused to deal with
sex.
These are where my
real questions are!
Rilke says. If you do
not help me in this
beginning question, if
the waters of my life
are muddied here at
the font, how can
anything else ever
come right?
Le Duc looks straight
into the portal of life
and keeps looking
until the dimensions of
sex, birth and creation
begin to be
illuminated. It is not
that everything can
be reduced to sex, it is
that sex is a reduction
of the entire structure
of nature and the soul.
“Reality is a fulcrum…if
you don’t have
something on which to
stand, then where can
you go from there?” le
Duc says. “That’s the
base of humanity, it’s
how we keep the
species alive and it’s
something that
doesn’t change.
“What is most interesting to me now is the fragility of
humanity. This is how I feel about the world at this time.
Personally we are fragile and the world right now is
fragile. There is a precariousness to the human race…The
only salvation for the human race would be something
spiritual.
“I hope my work can be a window on another dimension
of the world, a heightened awareness.”
For himself, le Duc also creates a heightened awareness.
“I don’t just want to make art that is easy to understand,
[though I want people to have access and I don’t want
to be obscure] but I want to make things that feel real to
me. Some artists do market studies but what I am trying
to do is more like extreme sports. It creates
destabilization in the observer. Not something
prepackaged, but that has an element of risk. Until the
last moment, I don’t know what that work will give. The
risk is what drives me.”
The paintings are an exposure of something that is usually
hidden, the fact of making them is a risk and an exposure
with the intention toward making the gaze sacred. That
is the work of turning from a purely aesthetic gaze to the
effort required when we allow something to work on us,
expose us—the viewer or the maker—until in penetrating
the essence of the thing, we learn to love.
Sacred Portal: The Exhibition
Sacred Portal is on exhibit at the Bill Lowe Gallery through April 30, 2012.
Bill Lowe Gallery 1555 Peachtree St NE, Suite 100
Atlanta, GA 30309
www.lowegallery.com
Pierre-Yves le Duc
Sacred Portal
© 2012 Mythic Imagination Institute
All Rights Reserved
Artwork
© 2012 Pierre-Yves le Duc
All Rights Reserved
Photography
© 2012 Dahlan Foah
All Rights Reserved