Le Dormeur, 1977

Georges Jeanclos  

“Georges Jeanclos (1933-1997) is one of the great French sculptors of the 20th century. His work was born in echo of the traumatic events of the Second World War. To escape the roundups that threaten the Jews in France, his family must hide in the woods; himself, aged about ten, learned to deal with the danger of death. In the aftermath of the Liberation, he saw the bodies of former collaborators hanging from the lampposts; shortly after, he discovers the skeletal beings who survived the camps. Decades later, Jeanclos reacted to this founding experience: not by closing himself off in his own experience, but by opening up to the universal, by listening to all suffering, past and present; not by representing horror, but by finding in it the strength to create beauty. Jeanclos transforms the earth with which he works into thin sheets, with the help of which he forms characters with similar faces, both children and adults, men and women. They are sleepers lying under a sheet of earth; beings locked in urns stamped with Hebrew letters taken from prayers for the dead; characters loaded onto boats that have left for the next world; kamakuras, bonzes in meditation, spectators of their interior gardens. Later there will be added Pietas, Adam and Eve lovers, couples who brush against or embrace. Jeanclos' images reveal both the insignificant weakness of our person and the irreducible strength of our love; by their very existence, they help us to live. "- Tzvetan Todorov