Cyril Barrand, beyond secret appearances

The primary practice of Cyril Barrand’s work is that of assemblage, of the putting into contact of apparently disparate elements which, bound by the will of the artist, propose a new reading of objects, paintings, installations, sculptures, videographic realisations, images, words... works whose construction is principally based on a problematic that he is right to qualify as « an aesthetics of liaison ».

In the first sculptures he developed in the middle of the 90’s from inflated second-hand air chambers associated with glass, metal, wood, osier or latex is already inscribed this will to reunite and associate diverse elements in a very personal vocabulary. The composite pictures made in the same period, painted in oil and acrylic, sewn with coloured buttons, perforated, crossed with traces and lines made with a plumb-line often have a significant title: Organisation, To patch up, Pattern... and like, the installations or objects, they reveal the same preoccupation, without renouncing the attempt to illustrate or explore a theme: Aphrodite’s inner garden or Planisphere (screw-point)... Poetry, humour or a certain gravity underlie these different assemblages, word games (because language too is manipulated), pseudo-citations come as a counterpoint to integrate themselves in the work, to complete it by shedding light on its sense while also returning the spectator to the composition and the overall aesthetic dimension.

Should we seek the origin of the relations that the artist has currently developed with Poland in a banner in honour of « Solidarnosc (Solidarity) » made at a friend’s behest by an adolescent Cyril Barrand? Or is it later, the realisation of a set-design for a staging of Ubu Roi (a play which, as everyone remembers, had a pejorative geographical perception of Poland) that explains his interest for this country? It is undoubtedly his presence in Warsaw, where he has been now for almost two years, which has led him to try to bring an objective gaze to bear on a country for which he has a real affection in an attempt to understand it better. It is at this point that video comes to join the artistic practices favoured up until now. Images, in their turn, come into juxtaposition and conglomerate like the outline of the map of Poland that has been decomposed, torn up, cancelled and recomposed a hundred times by the will to conquest and domination that have drawn and redrawn its contours over the course of the centuries. It is on a voyage that Cyril Barrand invites us, rocked by the strident sounds of a train whose monotone rhythm also measures the stages of a journey into history.

An interior journey, a meditation on the eternal relationship between Europe and Poland with its hopes and ruptures which draw us into the discovery of a chaotic destiny whose echoes we here and there perceive. Assembled fragments, the piled up images of a research, of a truth, of a belonging to a common history. This history is often a source of grief: certain words, certain names, certain stimuli to remorse are written in the language of signs at the point when its silences become too deafening. The traces and indices are very clearly present and they punctuate the voyage over the course of which the towns and forests of the great Polish plain pass in succession: they mark the itinerary of a people that has too often had its destiny imposed on it.

But solemnity and drama are not by themselves able to fill the holds of the memory completely. Derision is another form of memory. Like a glass box containing a Palace of Culture in the snow, a derisory souvenir suggests a liberation from complexes in the recognition of another element of an identity forged by history. Stalin’s embarrassing present to Poland, a monumental reminder of a time of oppression, for this precise reason deserves to be inscribed into the present, into the inventory of the past. The beautiful image of a flight of birds towards the azure sky then opens the doors and the questions of the future.

A voyage towards the elsewhere of an ancient country, far off but regained, that the vicissitudes of history have never been able to rip away from the European country, a Voyailleurs (a voyage or voyeurism to elsewhere) as Barrand terms it, is a lucid quest without concessions. It leads to the heart of the poetics of assemblage that he has always privileged (here composed of certain elements of the identity of a people and its history) with a sensitive approach to alterity. It sheds light on a history which we at last come to understand is also our own. Thus, a common European destiny, which reunites us and which awaits us, naturally leads our road towards the recognition of a forgotten and at last recovered proximity. What remains for us is to commit ourselves to discovering it, beyond its secret appearances.

Jean-Yves BAINIER, International Relations Adviser, June 2004
In catalogue Ici la Pologne! (Here’s Poland !)