Nicolas Kennett's «  Great Work »

 

To have had the idea or instinct to deposit on the supple surface of modelled clay, shapes as incongruous and antinomic as small clear-cut, industrially manufactured glass squares, rendered even more precise by the mechanics of the heady screws that hold them in place. To lacquer with black ink his bronzes rather than use patina.

These are two of the transgressions, of the outlandish inventions that confer to the works of Nicolas Kennett so much originality, strangeness and sombre and eerie beauty.They can, on first encounter, put one off-guard, ill at ease, for one doesn't quite know how to interpret them or what one is supposed to see in them. Animals for sure, as far as this exhibition goes. But how recognisable are they?

Sometimes he is drawn to make of these, of which he knows each configuration so well, unnameable shapes, indistinct masses?Even so, it's animal. And it's always with dark and primary, or rather primordial, clay that he first creates it. There came a time when, these dark masses, obscured moreover by the ink covering them, compelled him to lighten them up, to sublimate them, with gilded screws, with the bright-coloured squares he constellates them, and which, symbolically, take the animal represented on a great journey through time and space, into a starry night.

 

The need is also to reanimate, to revivify.In animals, he often sees the suffering, as he is particularly inclined to represent them as wounded beings, battered, broken, even dead at times.So he cures them with the very particular acupuncture of his screws, in place of needles, as he adorns the body in a primitive gesture of ornamentation, which is not without reminding us of an Aztec effigy, covered with a mosaic of lapis lazuli. Reduced and entirely covered, obsessively, with small glass squares of colour, held by an incredible number of screws, his sculptures appear as the most precious and eccentric jewels, most savage and most refined.

Some of these pieces are particularly extraordinary by there technical folly, such as works by Bernard Palissy, that one imagines having had, with a very different result, of course, the same desire to reach out to the exploit, the marvel, the Great Work for which there can be no economy of effort, no economy of time, in extreme concentration and put at a considerable risk.The great strength of Nicolas Kennett and his great artistic ambition is to put us in a situation where we have to give up all quest of references, in any case in our immediate artistic environment, and simply face the incomparable existence of his work.

 

Sylvain Lecombre