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

Mythic Imagination Institute

659 Auburn Ave, Suite 266

Atlanta, GA 30312

[email protected]

The Art of Myth PIERRE-YVES LE DUC

Documents

Transcript of The Art of Myth PIERRE-YVES LE DUC