Artistic approach
Alquin's love affair with trees began in childhood. He and his friends would scale their branches to summon the sun and the rain, drums in hand and flutes at their lips. These extraordinary memories speak volumes about the origins of the artist's relationship with nature. "What I can tell you straight away is that no sculpture in the world will ever be as beautiful as a tree,” he told Terra Artistika in 2023. The artist has worked with many different types. He has gone to see trees in their natural environment, in Japan, India and Côte d'Ivoire. Experiencing other cultures has taught him a great deal about what they represent for humanity. Wood is the raw material that allowed humans to explore different forms, long before metal. Materia in Latin means wood, as the artist likes to remind us. "Every volume that was ever conceived was first conceived in wood.”
Alquin has an aversion to any form of framework and wants to be able to call a sculpture into question at any time, sometimes even cutting it in half, drilling into it and gluing it back together. Nothing should get in the way of the movement of his hands, as in drawing. Wood gives that freedom, he says, pointing out that with wood, the sculptor is part of “the course of history”. The tree was there before him, the sculpture will be there after him. The artist is only present at a certain point in the transformation of the material. In the studio, Alquin resumes work on a sculpture that he has not touched for a long time. He adjusts a curve. “It's like the first birdsong of the day, something that wakes you up. Starting from this line, I regain confidence in the whole sculpture and can suddenly continue. It's as if I'm waking her up or waking myself up”.
He always remembers the tree as it stood, seeing it as a kind of compass. "Not a compass that points north, but a compass that points to the sky. It's not for nothing that I have gradually begun to gild certain parts of my sculptures. It's to testify to this light. The tree has a light within it.” And if Alquin does not sculpt trees, but rather people from trees, it is to show that the light does not come from outside, but from within us. In other words, there is no need to look far and wide for the sacred within ourselves. Perhaps we just need to get to know ourselves better, to get rid of everything that hides us from ourselves, just as the sculptor reveals the hidden being in a tree. For this, direct carving is ideal. It allows you to "clear the way" until you find what needs to be there. “Of course, there is an initial form that comes from an intention, but if I were all intention, I would be a dictator.” It is by attention that the sculptor chooses to leave or remove material. He must listen to the sculpture, because the work can only be done by the two together. He needs to be “totally available”.
Inevitably, there are times when things grind to a halt. Should you carve further at the risk of going down the wrong path? “When I realise I have reached that point of paroxysm where the sculpture is suddenly becoming a little refrain that's suffocating me, I only have one solution: dive in, cut it, even lose it. Dare to die.” If you look closely, in each of Alquin's pieces you can see the risk he has taken, the struggle with himself and his mechanisms, to dare to be and reinvent himself. But it is also important to know when to do nothing, to lie fallow so as to bear better fruit later on. “I can't imagine culture without agriculture,” says the artist. Because “that's where it all comes from.”
For the Art Season, Alquin’s sculptures are taking up residence in the Bee Barn. They include Les passantes, Le guide and L’envol. The artist brightens the oak timber by rubbing it with aerial lime. This is an astonishing mineral chemical compound which never turns grey. “It’s an earth full of light.” They emerge thanks to this technique, which also emphasises lines of energy and movement, and are all on a journey. “Les passantes are on the threshold. Le guide is a child leading a blinded adult. L’envol is lifting off the ground in a spiral movement to carry us away in its dance”, explains Alquin.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Born into a family of artists in Brussels in 1958, and after studying artwork restoration at the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, Nicolas Alquin was a frequent visitor to the studios of sculptors Reinhoud d’Haese and Etienne Martin. He developed his own artistic lexicon in accordance with three main vectors: wood (direct carving); beeswax cut and shaped directly from the mass (and sometimes cast in bronze); and sepia or black ink (for washes). Turning the precepts of post-minimalist sculpture on their head, Nicolas Alquin deploys a practice that replays the history of art, not without a good measure of intensity, summoning up references both central to and on the margins of the history of sculpture. In an ongoing dialogue between the Judeo-Christian iconographic heritage and the influence of primitive sculpture (African and Eastern alike) on contemporary western art, Nicolas Alquin’s works give concrete form to reflections on the relationship between the visible and the inexpressible, the hand and mind, the controlled and the random. He has no hesitation in appropriating so-called “traditional” techniques (direct carving most of all, along with bronze chiselling) in order to colour them with a variety of influences and put them into perspective. Excerpt from a text by Marc Bembekoff.
Nicolas Alquin is represented by Kamil Art Gallery, Monaco, Galerie Koralewski, Paris and Galerie Birch, Copenhagen.
