Yves Bonnefoy and Jacqueline Lamba
Untitled, 1958. Watercolour on paper, 49cm x 63, 8cm.
“As I write this, I am thinking of Jacqueline Lamba.”
– Yves Bonnefoy
‘I am thinking, as I write this, of Jacqueline Lamba…’. To coincide with the forthcoming publication of Yves Bonnefoy’s Œuvres in the Pléiade, we are republishing this text, written in 1967 on the occasion of an exhibition of Jacqueline Lamba’s paintings in Antibes.
Untitled, circa 1955. Oil on canva, 48cm x 40,5cm.
I read that in the language of certain American Indians the word mountain is a verb. Since then, I’ve been wondering about this accident of the verbal landscape, which only appears to me from a distance, its contours shifting like a figure in a dream. For such is the contradiction that makes it as fascinating as it is impossible: the mountain must be indicated, with its paths and its stones; but then how can we conceive that the action that, as a verb, it designates is simply some ‘appearing’ or ‘arising’? Since the sacred manifests itself on the summits, we might think that these were taken, with their distinctive features, as a symbol of its coming. Stretching out into the distance, surrounded by clouds, letting out a thousand torrents, lighting up, resounding – the verb mountain would be all of these things… I prefer to think that a more systematic intention was at work in this unusual language, and that it was, through a general fusion of the noun and the verb, to force the mind to experience the coming of the divine in every ‘thing’. The verb in the noun would make the object a life. Our languages have other laws and this project cannot take shape there. But does that make it absurd? Art is looking for itself on the edge of our linguistic resources, with incarnation as its destiny, and can take it on board.
As I write this, I am thinking of Jacqueline Lamba
Untitled, 1980. China ink on tracing paper, 43cm x 53,5cm.
As I write this, I am thinking of Jacqueline Lamba. What does she want, if not to identify the verb and the noun, in other words to reinvent the mountain – for a long time, as for Cézanne, its place – in what it has of enveloping and active: the plenitude that can seize when one goes into the stones? Everywhere she paints, there is the radiance of the hillsides, the magnetism of the slopes. I particularly like her networks of dots, which seem to mark the work of a mysterious aridity in the ground of perception. And it seems to me that they offer a kind of solution to the problem of the sign-life. These knots, and elsewhere these spots, these movements of colour, are spaced far enough apart to dislocate the entirely external and passive continuity that we project onto things. But they remain sufficiently in reciprocal sympathy, in convergence of forces, to suggest the interiority of a place, the unity of its existence beneath the variety of its planes, and so here we are on the move, engaged among aspects that succeed one another and unravel, passing through them which are nothing more than the remains of being.
Jacqueline Lamba: leaving behind the old house of sealed appearances – and coming together. Her rapid preliminary studies, always so sure, are an act of deliverance: you can hear the cry of the land returned to itself. And the proof is that the place is given to us in its entirety, despite the brevity of the indications: it’s as if the whiteness of the pages, more revealed than overcome by the Indian ink line, were identified with what we can’t see when we look at a blade of grass, but which is there all around us, quivering and filling us. Everything is alive, and first and foremost we, who no longer have to exhaust ourselves, maintaining order, enforcing appearance, containing the invisible that is only waiting to emerge.
Disturbing the accents of a deep white, her warm harmonies
But why, if this is so, does Jacqueline Lamba develop her paintings so slowly, why is she never at peace with the demands that are so much more within her than in the escarpments of Simiane, which, incidentally, she no longer has in her studio in Paris? Take a first look at her paintings, and you may be struck above all by the pure harmony of colours, by something abstract or musical in the interplay of patches, or even by the calligraphy at the top of many canvases, the bursts of dark blue or orange in the sky. Jacqueline Lamba likes to disturb the accents of deep white in her warm harmonies. She likes to paint on old newspapers, where the typography rises up through the figurative weave and connects with the shapes and colours. Is this competition between the structure of the work and the questioning of the object?
But note that the colours, for example, although intensified and quintessential, are still those of lavender or rock. And if these various elements, so concrete in their origin, together form a kind of range, which a certain type of writing uses, we must not think that this means leaving behind the place and the future of the first encounter. For the latter means projecting one’s feelings into the colours and rhythms of the landscape, one’s values into its forms, one’s happiness or drama into its harmonies and tensions: and letting it speak can only lead to a search for oneself. In language, which is only a verb, there is only personal speech. By decomposing the visual given, Jacqueline Lamba recomposes the given of being; and will return, through lived existence, through slowly approaching oneself in front of the sketched canvas, to what the first moment announced.
Dancers among grasses
Untitled, 1956. China Ink on traing paper, 57cm x 63,5cm.
And it is undoubtedly because of this union of the obvious place and the secret person, it is in this troubled atmosphere, always a little stormy, of place and speech, that these paintings seem to move, tapestries in the wind. The image and the ‘real’ object, the inside and the outside – who would dare to pretend that these are opposites? Images move here too, other images, and I can see the dancers of an archaic society emerging, almost motionless among the grasses, silent. The drum and sistrum resonate in the ravine. One dancer is painted yellow and white, because he is the mountain, another is masked in blue, so that the gap between them, the rift in the air that flickers and comes to life more and more, is the path or the summit, – the ‘real’ path there having become at the same moment their joy, their suffering, or rather the surpassing of one or the other in the unity that is being made.
‘On the slope of the embankment the angels turn in their woollen robes in the grasslands of steel and emerald’. Rimbaud, too, in Les Illuminations, attempted to synthesise subject and object, practised open-ended metaphor, fidelity to the intense. And when he comes to describe a painting, evoking ‘that band at the top of the picture’ which ‘is formed of the whirling and leaping rumour of sea conchs and human nights’, don’t we think that he has before his eyes, obviously through the eternity of poetic vision, one of Jacqueline Lamba’s paintings ?
Yves Bonnefoy, Jacqueline Lamba exhibition at the Musée Picasso (Antibes),
11th August-31st October 1967.
