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Beaurin and Domercq's impossible prototypes
Poised between ostensible purpose and mysterious fragility, these seemingly spontaneous sculptures explore the potential of their unusual materials and forms.
In an essay on the impossible search for a perfect language, Jorge Luis Borges recalls, or invents, an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia. In it, animals are subdivided thus: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tamed, (d) suckling, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) charging about in all directions, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with an extra-fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) that have broken the vase, (n) that from a distance look like flies. A subdivision of the kind might well also have been drawn with reference to the objects created by man. If that were so, however, featured at some point in the catalogue would certainly be the heading: (x) produced by Beaurin and Domercq.
Around the turn of this century, Vincent Beaurin and Fabrice Domercq, artists and designers, concentrated a combined production of almost spontaneous, almost unclassifiable sculptures, poised between ostentatious brightness and a very visible fragility. The biographical reference to design is at once also evident aesthetically. Not because the small sculptures by Beaurin and Domercq fall explicitly on either side of the (wholly theoretical) line drawn between design and the visual arts. But rather, because they reveal a very definite awareness of a spirit of contradiction and provocativeness, to which they relate with irony. At a careless glance, these works might indeed seem like objects of design, with the sharpness of their colours, the use of lively shades and the apparent essentiality of their forms combining to suggest a design aimed at serial production. Still more markedly, furthermore, the very structure of those objects appears to be connected to some sort of functional purpose, albeit perhaps sublimated, or superseded by merely compositional necessities. In reality, though, this closeness to the commodity immediately turns out to be a deliberate red herring.
Among the other things appearing in the joint project by Beaurin and Domercq, we find goblets, or ornaments, composed of found wooden sticks, slices of dried bread, or bits of sun-dried mandarin skins. These almost skeletal totems consist of vegetal elements that have become ligneous through time; of umbrella-shaped pendants, and hollow or convex structures composed of leaves, cotton thread and more fragments. Alternating with these are sculptures by Beaurin, of convex chalk mounds, with bevelled surfaces. Clearly serial but full of imperfections, each varies, in its colouring or context, from the next. The use of mandarin skins around one of these sculptures supplies the explicit connection between the two series.
The presentation of these objects, and their form, like the decision to alternate them with other more "conventional" artefacts, suggests precisely a kind of mass production. But the very nature of the constituent parts precludes this possibility. In almost every case, these are perishable materials, conforming more to the capricious evolutions of biological life than to the designer's needs. The attempt at, or aspiration to seriality is evident in Beaurin and Domercq's design strategy: the slices of bread are cut into almost regular dimensions, and further normalised by the methodical application of colour. The dried fruits are stripped of flesh, reduced to their common essential structure. No expedient, however, can hide the intrinsically precarious, near-random nature of the ensuing objects, for precarious is precisely what they are. They are sculptures almost despite themselves, because every single thing in them aspires to the object of design (with which, not by chance, they are associated in the exhibition context). Their manufacture, though, seems to condemn them to uniqueness.
Exploration of the constructional and design potential afforded by unusual, fragile materials condemned to imperfection was also pivotal to the Vorkurs conceived by László Moholy-Nagy for the Bauhaus, the principles of which were later revised, resumed and enlarged in the Basic Design courses held by Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. Students there were asked to design complex structures, using nothing but their basic material for the joints: a raw, plain and unusual material like paper, cardboard or balsa. This was a way of familiarising students with the "intimate nature" of materials, their potential and their weaknesses.
The results, however, which were often spectacular in their complexity and elegance, always shared a sort of extreme frailty, the precariousness of the prototype. They were clearly impermanent structures by their very nature. That same precariousness and impermanence is shared by Beaurin and Domercq's sculptures. They, too, are explorations of the potential offered by unusual materials. No series production, however, and no subsequent application can save them from fragility. For this, at bottom, is what they are. Vincenzo Latronico
