Lyrical Nature

Rock Wood Water Earth, this suite of ten prints, each consisting of a photogravure with a response in woodcut, owe their existence to a more specific origin: the Sequoia National and Pfeiffer National Parks in California, which the artist visited following a Gottlieb Foundation Grant given in May 2009. His ten-day trip provided him with a wealth of material, imagistic and conceptual. The visual poetry of the forest and grand natural scenery has been wonderfully used by Labauvie, who remains close to literature, and has quoted Rimbaud, Valery, and Genet to explain his art. The photogravures are based on photos taken during his visit to California; they anchor the woodcuts, whose organic forms adjust to and translate the images captured on camera. As a group, and over time, the suite of images establishes a remarkable sequence, whereby the essence of nature is transformed into highly developed imagery that extrapolates from known forms into abstraction.

The forms are evocative in their graphic simplicity, which emphasizes nature as coherent rather than random. In Les grands esprits s’entortillent a group of five yellow organic shapes, attached to each other, highlight the photograph of a sequoia tree underneath them. The composition conflates an organic abstraction with a natural one, leading its viewers to consider the relation between art, or culture, and nature. Intuitively, the print works as a mediation between what becomes in Labauvie’s hands a false dichotomy—his imagination is suffused with a scenery that doesn’t contrast so much as support a poetic interpretation of what he has seen. Another print, Watchtower, incorporates five transparent circles that shed light on a forest image; they intensify the visual interest of the photogravure that preceded them in the artistic process. The circles are perfectly drawn, and as geometric forms they assert themselves in some variance with their background, yet one does not sense that a conflict is occurring; rather, the two kinds of imagery coexist within the same space, each of them contributing to the overall sense of the composition.

Tokopah Falls consists of a photogravure of falling water, over which two rough rectangles, connected by a curving line, exist. One triangle, on the left, is vertically aligned; the other, on the right, is horizontal. They offer windows through which the details of the falls can be seen, while the rest of the composition is covered with a silver gauze that effectively hides the water. It is fair to say that Labauvie consistently presents a close-to-mystical connection with the nature that has so inspired him; the pictures of trees, rocks, water, and earth provide him with the foundation for the final image he builds. At the same time, though, he never lets go of the artistic tradition, primarily French, to which he belongs. The visual poetry Labauvie proposes deftly integrates a prelapsarian view of nature with a highly sophisticated cultural enterprise; thus the prints argue for a common goal. His unified, visionary intelligence, combining the manmade and the biotic, shows us that even now, in times when nature is being attacked in so many ways, there exists conditions in which the world is not undone.

Jonathan Goodman

New York, November 2010