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DeLoirenSeine Installation, Le Hangar Chalette-sur-Loing
The map and the 55 stories
If the canal is the backbone of this artistic approach, the stories of the inhabitants are its heart. Linked to the life and landscapes of the canal, these stories are gradually being put online. Following the slow-flowing canal, passing through each lock, from Nicole de Baraban to Bernard de Buges, you will open the book of the canal. That of life as it flows, ordinary and sublime.
Ballad for a canal. All along the Loing along the water. By Jacques Leenhardt
Great explorations have always used rivers to penetrate unknown lands. Rivers connect people, transport goods and ideas, and bring the distant close. Artists, most often, have sat on their banks to contemplate what constituted a landscape for them—a piece of a watercourse, a halted flow, a slice into the heart of the river. This was what was called “landscape painting,” adorned in tradition with nymphs or satyrs, and cows at the watering hole at sunset. Perhaps alone in this history of more than a century, Monet decided otherwise. He fitted out a boat to make it a floating studio, demonstrating thereby that he had a more dynamic notion of the river. Following the current, he discovered the transformation of the landscape, its mutations, as he had done elsewhere, following the shadows of the day on haystacks or the shifting chromatics on the porch of Rouen Cathedral.
Guykayser does not essentially hunt for these modifications affecting the landscape. The river he has chosen to place at the heart of his artistic device is a dynamic relationship rather than a liquid object shimmering in the sun. He understood the definition that Pascal once gave of rivers: “roads that move and carry us where we want to go.” In truth, this definition fits the canal even better, and it is indeed the course of the Briare Canal or the Loing Canal that Guykayser follows. With him, the artist becomes an explorer; he sets out in search of the links being woven, from town to village, along roads and towpaths, where the current carries and where the lock stops. The canal is a rhythm ordering the journeys of boatmen on its course and of farmers or workers on its banks. It is as if the color, tints, and lights that Monet sought, Guykayser found in the human swarm that surrounds, crosses, and exploits the slow-flowing canal.
One hundred kilometers is a very small stretch of water, but already, under the gaze of one who has come to see and understand, and who in this waiting always finds reasons to respect and love, these few kilometers harbor people, anonymous passions, and finally, worlds.
The artist is often called egocentric. These days, I see him, on the contrary, more concerned with the world around him than with a tiny self inflated to the dimensions of the universe. In any case, Guykayser is one of those who look beyond the studio, at the inhabitants of Chalette or the lock-keepers of the canal. He immediately realizes that this little piece of “Douce France,” this picture-perfect image of our identity so often sung by Charles Trenet, hides an unsuspected diversity, concealing from a biased gaze a richness of contrasts, trajectories, and identities that no one suspected.
The canal winding nonchalantly between two rows of poplars—Monet had painted it, and a thousand others before and after him. They all made it an emblem of this rural France so dear to nostalgic hearts. In the horizontality of its course, it is part of that earthly dimension of our imagination to which the poplar brings the contrast of its verticality, just as the village church steeple contrasts with the horizontal mass of houses and fields where the gaze is lost in infinity. Two images of France, two advertising images.
But in the folds of this vision, both true and deceptive, all those who inhabit the postcard without its knowledge have found a place to stay. And for example, in this apparently so “French” land, Guykayser met many foreigners, coming from other countries, or more simply from other regions of France. From generation to generation, in their diversity, they have nourished this soil with their desires and their sorrows; they have brought their culture and the objects to which their memories remained attached. Guykayser listened to their story, gave it a form, opening doors at random in village streets and soothing the restive shyness behind which every life likes to protect itself. It was undoubtedly a wonder to see that so close to home, without anyone paying attention, so many unsuspected people were gathered with their trades and skills, so many stories of solitude and happiness, ordinary and sublime: human.
The artist keeps his eyes open, and his attention calls back to life what threatens to disappear without a trace. Now, it is they who have the floor, they who pass across the projected image. They see, as their neighbors see, what it is to be there, inhabitants of a land that winds between two banks, of a land of towpaths and toil, beautiful in its constrained sinuosity. By dint of recomposing the image of this world we thought we knew, it takes on a new face. It multiplies into landscapes and stories; each place and each object takes on the dimension of an adventure and a life experience. Places speak of people, and inhabitants reconstitute a geography by narrating their journey.
What forms the center of the installation where Guykayser has summoned this diversity is the lock, a ladder on the course of the canal, which for a moment equalizes different levels. It is there that the trajectories of men and women passing from one bank to the other meet, just as the opposing courses of the canals gather, tracing their useful paths between Seine and Loire, uniting random destinies at this crossing point. The lock is a mechanism of connections between two reaches where two watercourses of unequal height meet. It functions, of course, both as the central point of an emblematic landscape that Guykayser has chosen for his investigation and as a metaphor for the meeting of trajectories, the adjustment of experiences. The lock-keeper in his cabin is a kind of ferryman, the confidant in whom the artist has undoubtedly recognized himself a little. He is there, sitting in the suspended time of the maneuver. Water must flow through the sluices and under the footbridges. In this time-out from work, a space is given to speech. It is the time for story and confidence. The lock-keeper is the registrar of lives that flow and meet, mixing distant origins and unusual professions. He has his crank near him, with which he will raise the sluices and turn the footbridges: master of the world’s mechanics, deus ex machina, the lock-keeper turns the crank of the great circus of destinies, as in Max Ophüls’ La Ronde.
The artist himself remains somewhat in the background. He has set up, in the background, images of the landscape, of the quiet countryside unfolding, with its villages and poplars. He has recorded the voices, he has heard how each person has built their story, he has photographed the elusive movement of water swirling around the slightest object. By the reservoir, he listened to the birds, and at the café, the inhabitants. His restraint is that of the collector who gleans meaning at the bend of paths and in the silences of speech.
The installation is the moment when he restores to those who gave it to him everything he has stored up. And if what returns after this long detour is not exactly what each person thought they had given, it is because a strange alchemy has mixed destinies, because each has exercised their power over the other, and the artist in this matter is not the least concerned—he who, through others, has also relived his own passages, his mixtures, and his identities. This difference is, in a way, what he gives in turn to those who had the generosity to enter the circle of these exchanges. In this game, ultimately, there are only winners!
