Temptations and Palpitations

2023

Invited to take over the church of Saint-François in Lausanne with the artist Gilles Furtwängler, Christian Gonzenbach proposes five monumental plaster sculptures.

THE TEMPTATION OF FORM

To give form to the formless, a face to God, an image to the sacred: to create sculptures one may admire, adore, venerate. Against this the Protestants rebelled — God is not to be depicted — just as Islam forbids all figuration, divine or human. And so the Temple of Saint-François, on Protestant soil, is without images. At the Reformation, however, while Europe burned, the Baroque was born in Italy: as if the Roman Church answered Protestant austerity with an excess of forms, an overabundance of drapery, of scrolls, of expression.

As a sculptor, I am fascinated by every kind of form — stalagmites, mushrooms, clouds — and by their depiction in art. But where is the temptation in sculpture? Every temptation offers a choice: one option alluring but toxic, and the possibility of renouncing it — a painful renunciation that opens onto a form of spiritual elevation. What is it that draws us to certain forms? In what way might they be dangerous? Does the peril lie in the pleasure or in the forms themselves?

We are no longer in the age of religious wars, perhaps no longer even Christian; and yet here we stand in this proud vessel, seven or eight centuries old, laden with the history of Lausanne — a church that saw the Reformation born and still welcomes all who cross its threshold. These questions I cannot answer today, but they will guide my work — at the very least I will be able to share the path travelled and the forms it will have brought forth.

What I already know: I want to bring forms back to Saint-François, to bring back the Baroque! I will make five large sculptures in traditional materials — stucco, plaster and staff — set, in the classic manner, on wooden plinths. The whole challenge lies in their subject: at once familiar, as one expects to meet in a church, and unexpected enough to surprise us.

Collaboration between Gilles Furtwängler and Christian Gonzenbach

From the outset, the two artists wanted their practices to enter into dialogue, so that the exhibition would form a whole inseparable from this singular setting. Each brings his own expertise: one the words, the other the form. The temptation to give meaning, the temptation to depict. The hang will be conceived in strata: forms rising from the floor, words suspended in the air, in a three-way tension — the church and the works of the two artists.