Richard Baquié's figure appears in the middle of a century which reinvents, after Marcel Duchamp's verdict and investigation of a new anthropological continent, the notion of sculptural object. The end of the era of the mechanization, the revaluation of the vernacular practices, the presence of the immense construction site that establish the consequences of the war, the extinction of the industrialization, the repercussions of the consumerism, lead the artists to explore, in particular through the Pop art in the USA, through the New Realism in Europe, a field where the sculpture redefines its ways, releases itself from usual conventions to come to drink in all the visual, formal, allegorical, imaginary resources, stemming from this rubble. Each working specifically to dismember, to count, to select the different components of a Vanity in the measure of a past world.
In this landscape of eclipse and revival, both stimulating and funeral, Richard Baquié will know, with an innate sense of the poetry of things, a tone at once light and melancholic, disillusioned and tender, introduce a narrative dimension, sensitive, sentimental and biographical, which will save him from all banality, will help to completely renew the perception of this universe of vestiges and to miraculously revive it. An intuitive and lucid artist, he would not neglect the various stages that had enabled the sculpture to free itself from the heavy tyranny of its habits and technical processes. In an interdisciplinary, landscaped vision, which prefigures the deconstructive modes of installation, which sometimes recalls, but elegantly casually, the practices of the Arte povera, he enjoys making sound, light, cinema, photography, motion, water, electricity, and the most disparate materials coexist and dialogue? All these structures, all these assemblies, are played with a disarming virtuosity, a constant playful sense, the diversity of their deliberately composites amalgams, displaying a predilection for the fragility of processes resulting from recovery and DIY.
We can consider Richard Baquié's production, as evidenced by his latest production, « Replica without title n°1 of the State given? » *, a sham of a sham, namely Marcel Duchamp's ultimate message, as a cheerful and impertinent comedy to the one she identifies as the originator and as an invitation to overcome its intimidating irony. If the visceral anxiety of the artist, his perpetual dissatisfaction, cannot fail to appear to us as a premonition of a disappearance too soon threatening, far from being truncated or diminished, his work today finds in his intuitions an increased relevance and vitality.
Henry-Claude Cousseau
August 2017
* This work by Richard Baquié is central to the recent exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, dioramas.