Richard Baquié, Dominique Seux
Richard Baquié is associated with the artistic movement, which is often referred to as "garbage art". Initiated by Picasso and Braque with the introduction of collage, radicalized by Schwitters and then developed by Rauschenberg, this art asserted itself in France in the sixties with the New Realists such as Tinguely, Arman and Spoerri. Today Tony Cragg and Bill Woodrow in Great Britain, Richard Baquié in France are the artists, representative of this original movement based on waste recovery.
After having sketched the subject and designed his project to put it in shape, Baquié set out to search, like a "rag-maker", for materials he found in landfills, old objects destined for scrap or scrap. He cuts them, assembles them and from completely heterogeneous elements creates homogeneous parts. To remove all emphasis, it willingly gives a precarious aspect or a deliberately banal configuration to its installations. It reuses forgotten techniques, outdated by progress, uses outdated machines, uses chromo or kistch images. This attitude is indicative of a certain nostalgia for objects of the past, of its rejection of sophistication.
But the essential and original approach of Baquié is to want to create «a sculpture that acts». Whether its installations are «machine sculptures» or «static sculptures», the staging of the subject is paramount. The object is put in a situation to tell a story and become the support of the spectator's imagination. Through the choice of the subject, the natural or mechanical elements that intervene in his sculptures, the language integrated into his installations, the artist seeks to recreate a symbolic world. Baquié calls it "displacement".
Many of his installations put in position some distinctive vehicle attributes or their totality: a train door, He used to take the train to disguise his worry in weariness (1984) ; a simplified representation of an aircraft, Wind situation (1983); pieces of carling of Caravelle, Dérive or its model South (1986); a deliberately chromo view of Amsterdam airport, Schipol (1987); cut-out cars, Amore mio (1985); Low voltage, High voltage (1987). Baquié explains: "The vehicle has one objective, that of compiling distances, it orients itself according to its destination". In this way, he moves the imaginary of the spectator, playing on the notions of time and space.
This interactive game between time and space is often also suggested by the dynamic use of elements outside the object: water, air, noise, sound. Water, through electrical processes, refrigerates, evoking speed and cold in Plymouth West (1985), transforms into steam to simulate aircraft passage in clouds, South (1986), circulates in a continuous circuit to express «the permanent nourishment» of love in Forgotten Passion (1984). The air, the wind, produced by fans evoke the physical displacement, In the past he took the train to disguise his worrying weariness (1984), or space Schipol (1986). The sounds, the noises also participate in the animation of his sculpture: they allow to mime a physical movement, The Crossing of the Present (1986), or when they secrete songs through the intermediary of old transistors or electrophones, they bring back our memories: Plymouth Sud (1985).
Language is also an essential element of the mental displacement that Baquié wants to provoke in the spectator. In his first works the titles were very long, to add meaning to the subject or to clarify the narrative. In fact nothing happened, long after the war, he still feared an ambush (1985). Later he plays on the semantic displacement between the word contained in the title and that of the play. Thus in 1987, he exhibited a work formed by the words FIN DE SIECLE to which he gave the title of Beginning. During an exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1987, where the first exhibit was entitled Dérive, la dernière Sud, Baquié declared : "It is up to everyone to create their history in this drift towards the south". Finally the word allows Baquié to express also his personal feelings and the lyricism inherent in all his work: Solitude, Forgotten Passion, The impotence to solve? But it is above all a pretext for asking the question of the visual power of language in art. The phrase is: "Is the word a receiver or a transmitter?" , "Does the image make the word or does the word make the image?"
But a sculpture that works is also for Baquié a sculpture that structures the space so that it «no longer makes center». The most striking example of this intention is that of Amore Mio (1985): this installation, made up of four different pieces placed at the four cardinal points of the exhibition hall, directly appeals to the spectator who, instead of moving around the work, wanders in the middle of its various components. However, if he fragmentes space, he reconstitutes the unity by giving his four pieces a single Plymouth title if he distinguishes them by the directions West, South, East, North, he designs them to be part of the same project. This work at the same time analytical and synthetic is one of the constants of his works.
However, since 1988, while preserving the ambiguity between impression and reality, between word and image, between space and time, Richard Baquié seems to be moving towards a more simplified construction of space, Rather bi-dimensional and tends to favour the frontal aspect in his sculpture: Instant of doubt (1988); Nowhere is a place (1989).