Great explorations have always used rivers to penetrate unknown lands. Rivers connect people, transport goods and ideas, bringing closer what is distant. Artists, more often than not, sat on their banks to contemplate what constituted a landscape for them: a stretch of waterway, a halted flow, a slice of the river’s vibrant life. This was what was called “landscape painting,” traditionally embellished with nymphs or satyrs, and at sunset, cows at the watering hole. Perhaps only Monet, in this history spanning more than a century, decided otherwise. He fitted out a boat to make it a floating studio, thereby demonstrating that he had a more dynamic notion of the river. Following the current, he discovered the transformation of the landscape, its mutations, just as he had done elsewhere, tracking the day’s shadows on haystacks or the shifting chromaticism on the porch of Rouen Cathedral.
Guykayser does not primarily chase these changes affecting the landscape. The river he chose to place at the heart of his artistic endeavor is a dynamic relationship rather than a shimmering liquid object in the sun. He understood Pascal’s old definition of rivers: “paths that walk and carry you where you want to go.” In truth, this definition applies even better to canals, and it is indeed the Canal de Briare or the Canal du Loing that Guykayser follows. With him, the artist becomes an explorer, seeking the connections that weave, from town to village, along roads and towpaths, where the current carries, where the lock stops. The canal is a rhythm ordering the journeys of boatmen on its course and of peasants or workers on its banks. It is as if the color, hues, and lights that Monet sought, Guykayser finds in the human teeming that surrounds, crosses, and exploits the slow-flowing canal.
One hundred kilometers is a very small stretch of waterway, but already, under the gaze of one who came to see and to understand, and who in this expectation always finds reasons to respect and to love, these few kilometers conceal people, anonymous passions, indeed, worlds.
Artists are often said to be egocentric. These days, on the contrary, I see him more concerned with the world around him than with a minuscule 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 then immediately realizes that this small piece of “Douce France,” this idealized image of our identity so often sung by Charles Trenet, hides an unsuspected diversity, conceals from the prejudiced eye 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. All of them had made it an emblem of that rural France so dear to nostalgic hearts. In the horizontality of its course, it is part of this earthly dimension of our imagination, to which the poplar brings the contrast of its verticality, just as the village church bell tower contrasts with the horizontal mass of houses and fields where the gaze loses itself infinitely. Two images of France, two advertising images.
But in the folds of this vision, both true and deceptive, all those who unknowingly populate the postcard have found a place to dwell. And for example, in this seemingly so “French” region, Guykayser met many foreigners, from other countries, or more simply from other regions of France. From generation to generation, in their diversity, they nourished this soil with their desires and sorrows, they brought their culture and the objects to which their memories remained attached. Guykayser listened to their stories, gave them a form, opening doors at random in village streets and soothing the reluctant shyness behind which each life likes to protect itself. It was undoubtedly a marvel 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 opens his eyes, and his attention brings back to life what threatens to disappear without a trace. Now, it is they who speak, they who appear on the projected image. They see, as their neighbors see, what it is to be there, inhabitants of a land that winds between two banks, a land of towpaths and toil, beautiful in its constrained sinuosity. By constantly recomposing the image of this world we thought we knew, it now takes on a new form. It multiplies into landscapes and narratives, each place and each object taking on the dimension of an adventure and the experience of a life. Places speak of people, and inhabitants reconstruct a geography by narrating their journeys.
What forms the center of the installation where Guykayser has brought together this diversity is the lock, a ladder on the canal’s course, which momentarily equalizes different levels. It is there that the trajectories of men and women crossing from one bank to the other meet, just as the opposing courses of the canals, tracing their useful paths between the Seine and the Loire, converge, bringing together random destinies at this crossing point. The lock is a mechanism of connections between two reaches where two waterways of unequal height meet. It functions, of course, both as the central point of an emblematic landscape that Guykayser chose for his investigation and as a metaphor for the meeting of trajectories, for the adjustment of experiences. The lock keeper in his cabin is a kind of ferryman, a confidant in whom the artist 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 timeless moment of work, space is given to speech. It is a time for stories and confidences. The lock keeper is the registrar of lives that flow and meet, mingling distant origins and unusual professions. He has his crank nearby, 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’s La Ronde.
The artist, for his part, remains somewhat in the background. He has set up, in the background, images of the landscape, of the serene country unfolding, with its villages and poplars. He has recorded voices, he has heard how each person constructed their story, he has photographed the elusive movement of water swirling around the smallest 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 turn of paths and in the unspoken words of conversations.
The installation is the moment when he returns to those who gave it to him all that he has accumulated. And if what comes back after this long detour is not exactly what everyone thought they had given, it is because a strange alchemy has mingled destinies, that each has exercised their power over the other, and the artist in this matter is not the last concerned, he who, through others, also relived his own passages, his mixtures and his identities. This difference is, in a way, what he in turn gives to those who had the generosity to enter into the round of these exchanges. In this game, ultimately, there are only winners!
