It is always as if by inadvertence that painting lingers on the painter’s ladder. Being neither the wall nor the ceiling, the ladder is never, in appearance, anything but a “non-place” of painting. And yet it accompanies the painter as do the brush and the palette.
The marks upon it could not therefore be those of art. They are nonetheless those of the artist at work. They are a part of the memory of his work, too quickly forgotten, the path of access to the true place of art, the stations of the cross of the artist’s body.
We remember the numerous photographs immortalizing Matisse on his ladder. They recall Courbet working on The Studio and Michelangelo, lying on his scaffolding, between heaven and earth, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In its own way, the ladder is therefore an integral part of the history of painting. Yet it had never really been looked at.
Never had attention been paid to this slender form rising from the earth toward an ideal zenith, never had it been linked to those painted surfaces that are paintings, which customarily monopolize our attention entirely. Guykayser has attempted to make this humble and fundamental object visible to us in its complex relationship with the sensory universe of painting.
Of course one thinks first, once the image of the house painter in his motley Pierrot outfit has been banished, of the symbolic ladder, that of the great cosmologies, the one Jacob saw in his dream and by which the Angels ascended and descended. Painter Angels, well now, we thought they were all musicians! However, the symbol of the link between heaven and earth, of that verticality celebrated by ancient religions maintains, it must be admitted, more connections with the music of the spheres than with our pictorial here-and-now. Yet Guykayser’s work concerns itself little with the beyond. His way of speaking about painting, obliquely and from the side, gestures toward Mondrian or Kandinsky, toward the dialectic of surface and structure, without feeling obliged to make a detour through the “spiritual in art.” He prefers to pay tender attention to the physical presence of the painter’s support, always organically linked to the very support of painting. Both are one in the overall composition, they are ONE.
Guykayser polishes, scrapes and covers, with an almost artisanal love for the craft, these found objects that he has nonetheless sought, and which themselves exhibit their rigorous adjustments, the cabinetmaker’s pride. The ironic mistrust of the transcendental expressed in these choices, he whispers to us softly in our ear, but it is doubtless not by chance that he has often clipped the wings of his celestial steps. Shortened, truncated, inserted in abyme, his ladders occupy the very space that is ours, neither too high nor too low. He would not want them to impress us with their capacity to be on familiar terms with the sky, like those towers of Babel where pride grew. Once they have passed through his hands, they are just barely terrestrial, like all true painting, like the material from which sculptures are made.
Already in the past Guykayser had worked on assemblages. The reused materials seemed to constitute together a new object, almost already destined for a new utility. One found oneself then in that contemporary space of art where sculpture, from Deacon to Purryer, from Messac to Armleder, invents the objects of an impossible everyday, perhaps wanting to indicate an everyday made impossible by objects.
Recycling, however, takes on an entirely different dimension here due to the inescapable presence of the symbol. With the ladder, Guykayser has indeed given himself two universes at once, and he obliges the viewer to consider his objects, alternately as forms and as meanings, thus disrupting the tranquil play of our aesthetic habits. Placed before these ladders, we understand that their evocative power stems from the fact that forms and meanings resymbolize one another by fixing themselves in this single object that unites them. Is this not the very core of that question of representation, around which art has been turning relentlessly for nearly a century?
Jacques Leenhardt
Paris, September 1994
