In today's Art world - which seems hardly separable from
a Metropolis Art Market - despite the glut of aspiring
artists and critics and movements making ever more
extravagant gesticulations to attract even ephemeral
attention, Andre Bucher erupts as one figure genuinely
worthy of recognition. His work does not belong to any
one school, and because it defies being readily
pigeon - holed into some trendy category, you may not find
him listed in books or magazines that are busy preparing
this year's fashions for the new Art season. But Andre
Bucher's artistic gesture astonishes with its epic daring,
and his artistic product dazzles the senses while
resonating in every corner of the mind. His journeys to the
belching crown of Mount Etna, while clad in a hightech
suit like an astronaut, enact a mythic confrontation
between the Hero and the Titans of the Earth - the fiery
jaws of the Dragon, the ringing forge of the Gods. And at
the same time, this ambivalent geomancer/geologist
performs a scientific probe, an experiment during which
the explorer, like Euclid, may look on cosmic Beauty
bared: the primeval recreation of mountains with molten
matter.
Remarkably, the sculptures of Andre Bucher manage
to add up to even more than the breathtaking event that
surrounds their birth. This "performance" of Bucher's
constitutes an integral part of each sculpture, which, in
that context, is a document of a happening or process.
But Bucher's structures, as assemblages of polished
technic modular elements with the frozen moment of
organic activity inherent in the cooled lava, function as
contemplative vehicles - yantrasfor "recollection in
tranquility" of the spectacular encounter between a man's
handiwork and Nature's navel. Unlike the more rarefied
Earthworks (which Bucher has also produced: e.g., his
Great Wedge "cliff-hook" at Evolene) that might remain
remote and be experienced by only a handful of people,
Bucher's lava sculptures function as a full system in Jack
Burnham's sense - involvinb the
viewer in a conceptual network that questions ident ity and
process, signification and evaluation. The magnificent
Positive-Negative Object, with its burned traces, forces
the observer to become the subject of an event, feeling
the scarred wood, the searing moment of propulsion,
fusion, formation forces the observer to consider whether
matter and anti-matter, shadow and substance, presence
and absence, to be or not to be, are separable concepts
at all, or necessarily symbiotic. Balance and Penetration
and Pendulum call us to re-consider what we can weigh,
how we can be pierced, which Time or Gravity we are
capable of measuring.
Recognition and Creation, with their reminiscence of
molecular structures and Alchemical expansor emblems,
evoke our humble ignorance of the greater cosmic
processes, as do the phallic action of Seismic or the
inscrutable oracular ambiguity of Tables of the Law, with
its burnished bronze surface darkly mirroring the rough
face of its twin - mythic anti-theses of raw and cooked,
fashioned and organic, ingenuous and intransigent and
individuated ...
Bucher manages to resist the messianic or prophetic
presumptuousness that might have accrued from the
audacity of his heroic performance. The sculptures sustain
a serene but vigorous ambience - richly and diversely
sensuous, engaging but not prescriptive, comprehensive
and vast yet intimate and personal in their ultimate
existence within the observer... Such pensive and palpable
exuberance, even in one or two pieces, is the rare gift of a
master. |
