Keeping company: sculptures by Alain Kirili and the 19th-century artist Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux were recently juxtaposed in a French museum. The exhibition made the case for the enduring worth of free and direct modeling in contemporary practice - Report From Valenciennes

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Anne Rochette, Wade Saunders

The peripatetic French sculptor Alain Kirili has divided his time between Paris and New York for almost 30 years. In New York he is best known for his works in metal, both vertical forgings and arrays of smaller welded-steel sculptures, particularly the "Commandment" series. His European exhibitions have been quite varied: besides metal pieces, he has shown abstract works in terra-cotta, plaster, cement, stone, wax, urethane foam and cast polyester resin, sometimes as single pieces, sometimes grouped in roughly 10- to 30-element ensembles. Kirili's durable involvement with modeling--out of fashion with most contemporary sculptors--was at the heart of his recent exhibition at the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes, a major repository of native son Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's (1827-1875) preparatory sketches, terra-cottas and drawings.

Kirili has long striven to build bridges from his sculpture to the work of historical artists and also to that of living artists in other disciplines, such as music, recontextualizing his work and theirs. He has written about Hindu sculpture, Giacometti's painted plasters [see A.i.A., Jan. '79], Rodin's erotic drawings and the work of David Smith [see A.i.A., Oct. '83]. His writing offers a close reading of these artists' works while arguing the continuity of his sculpture with that of his chosen masters. Recently, his efforts were crucial to a group of modern and contemporary sculptures being installed permanently in the Tuileries Garden in Paris.

He has also published a book on the dialogue between his own sculpture and jazz, seeing in free jazz an analogue of his own rapid, direct and improvisational working processes. Kirili finds frequent occasion to invite musicians or dancers to perform with and among his sculptures, and has sometimes shaped pieces while musicians played [see A.i.A., Dec. '96]. Musical terms increasingly figure in his titles (Allegro, Presto, Sforzando).

In Valenciennes, Kirili engaged anew in a sort of jam session, this time with Carpeaux, a sculptor born 119 years before he was. In a published dialogue with Patrick Ramade, the show's curator, Kirili convincingly argues that Carpeaux's direct and free modeling was continued and extended by Rodin, Matisse and, later on, de Kooning, but largely rejected by Maillol, Bourdelle and Moore. Kirili emphasizes Carpeaux's nimble-fingered pleasure in rendering human flesh and considers it an antidote to the puritanical denial of the body, which he deems rampant today.

The majority of Kirili's works shown in Valenciennes were relatively small scale, chiefly terra-cottas, with a few direct polychrome waxes and cast plasters. Several larger pieces, modeled in clay then molded and cast in plaster, concrete or bronze, completed this overview of the artist's involvement with modeling. (The show also included 19 of his drawings and five photographs.)

In the terra-cottas, Kirili most often combines differently pigmented clays to yield an indwelling rather than applied polychromy. These pieces are basketball-size or smaller, since that is the mass which Kirili can heft, manipulate and fire comfortably. The surface is open and sensual, and one feels a musical push and pull, fold and stretch. The cast works range from the size of a bust to that of a standing figure. Their surface is less immediate, both because Kirili attacks the clay originals in a more classical and reflective manner, and because of the mediation of the casting process.

In the exhibition's first two rooms, Kirili's works were installed within the museum's collection of Carpeaux's sculptures and studies. In the second two rooms, Kirili's pieces stood on their own, but for the company of a few Carpeaux sketches on paper, stunning in their freedom and mastery of hand. Kirili made certain pieces in direct dialogue with Carpeaux's sculptures, most noticeably in a series of small polychrome waxes (Fa Presto I-IX, 2001). But in most cases, the visual connections between the artists' works preexisted their rendezvous in Valenciennes.

The show's pairing of modern and historical often was illuminating, as in the encounter between Carpeaux's small cast plaster study (1863-64) for the standing bronze Watteau that presides over a local square and Kirili's slightly larger plaster Nun (1984), whose surface is marked with an easy dancing rhythm of black ink lines. Both pieces are deft and equally communicative of speed and lightness. When seen alongside Kirili's sculpture, Carpeaux's figurative piece is no longer perceived as a study for the well-known monument, but viewed anew as a work in itself. When Carpeaux probed, poked and prodded his clay sketch, the marks stood for Watteau's finery, but here they recover their abstract immediacy. The very process of modeling threatens the figure's integrity.

The juxtaposition of the earlier artist and the later helped us see which qualities are common to both bodies of work and which specific to one or the other. The pairing of Carpeaux's cast-plaster Sketch of Ugolin and His Children (ca. 1857-61) with Kirili's Bird (1998), a black-and-white terracotta, pointed to a shared brutality, as if the urgency of the shaping suffered little restriction, either from mimesis in Carpeaux's case, or from taste and formalism in Kirili's.