LE RUISSEAU NOIR 

JOACHIM BANDAU

       A white square attached to a white body. This hybridization of body and art (Beinprothesen-Sarg, 1972) is one of Joachim Bandau’s earliest sculptures. It lies in the middle of the gallery space, as if washed ashore by a torrent of black water: that of the surrounding Schwarze Aquarelle, whose flow the German artist has been trying to control since the early 1980s.

       The title, Le Ruisseau noir, refers to a late painting by Gustave Courbet. A large-format from 1865, currently in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, that takes us into a narrow gorge darkened by lush vegetation, near Ornans, where the Brème stream flows slowly. Although no human or animal presence can be seen in this deep ravine reminiscent of an unspoiled «jungle», tree stumps and rocks almost resemble bodies washed ashore. This mysterious nature becomes the physical and mental refuge of a solitary walker. Courbet and Bandau share this attraction for dark, enclosed spaces, where one can withdraw into oneself. The German artist, who barely escaped several bombings during the Second World War, took an interest in forms of confinement, not only in his early sculptures, but later in his Bunkers, both places of withdrawal and deployment.

        The exhibition presents three historic sculptures by Joachim Bandau. From 1967 to 1974, he produced sinuous and biomorphic structures made of polyester and rubber, evoking medical equipment or organic machinery, comparing scientific advances with the black atrocities of the Second World War. These «monsters», or «non-beauties», are imbued with a violent vision of the alienated body, both protected and constrained by modern technology. Sometimes moving and inhabiting both floor and walls, these sculptures underline one of Bandau’s main themes: the tension between confinement and deployment. 

       Movement is also omnipresent in Courbet’s composition: the river cuts through the landscape and crisscrosses the canvas. Water in motion permeates Bandau’s exhibition. It can be seen in the swirls of Verdeckter Arm (1971), in the shimmering surface of Flossenrelief (1974), but above all in the vibrations of the Black watercolors, initiated 50 years ago, which are superimpositions of light-gray watercolor layers applied by hand to achieve deep blacks. As in Courbet’s painting, black becomes the infallible absorption of light [1]. 

       «The viewer deciphers the work in reverse» explains the artist, referring to the composition of these pictures, which consist of a multitude of individual paintings (sometimes more than forty) as well as their fragile, liquid appearance. «Each new layer is a response to the previous one, positioned in an intuitive arrangement within a temporal sequence. I sometimes spend months, even years, on a single work.» One can also see photographic films accidentally shifted, their contours blurred by sudden, erratic movements. Or glass shards spread out like fan-shaped cards. It is time recorded on paper, just like the early days of cinema and chronophotography. 

       If you look closely, the Black watercolors aren’t perfectly straight: they have curved edges and hand-drawn lines that subtly meander. The superimposition of watercolor layers is sculptural, like a mass in the making. Shapes appear, space splits according to the viewer’s point of view. In their radical autonomy, these pure, meditative sheets, which are probably Bandau’s most intimate work, allow us, in their transparent, liquid weightlessness, to take an open look at the sculptor’s desire to master a form.

Like his sculptures, the Black Watercolors convey simultaneous sensations of contraction and extension, whose psychological and existential essence expresses positions of both withdrawal and openness to the world. 

[1] Joachim Bandau has been producing these ‘black’ watercolors since 1983. Between 2005 and 2006, he stepped away from the black austerity to produce yellow watercolors; while black represents the gradual absorption of light, yellow refers to its very excess.