Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Trèfle, 2006 (PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Torino)
CAMILLA BARESANI
on Trèfle by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
PAV Parco Arte Vivente
There are works that are like codes that must be cracked: interpreting them requires one to drag in the artist’s biography, overall vision, likes and dislikes. You go to the museum, to the park, to the home of some rich collector, and the explanations commence, like with certain overthought, overwrought dishes by master chefs. But with Trèfle, it’s just the opposite: you end up feeling no need to know more about the artist’s intellectual journey, you forget about currents and counter-currents, you venture no interpretations based on the kind of gallery representing the work.
Because a clover is a clover, a lawn is a lawn, a stroll is a stroll. If you want to know what Trèfle is like, try imagining a country landscape. Let’s start with the shimmering green of the grass: sparkling and swollen with chlorophyll in the spring; mustardy, turning tobacco-brown as the summer drags on; then a green soured into lemon in the autumn – every so often, growing boggy with rain; in the end we see it crisp with frost, sometimes snow, in the winter.
But take note: in this grassy field is a stem, the stem of a four-leaf clover. Rather than resting on top of the turf, it is dug into it, with a border of rocks – like dry-stone walls – holding up the sides of the trench. It has an air of Dorsetshire, and reminds you of the happier moments for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, when she walks, full of love and hope, along rock-edged paths that mark mysterious borders.
And so let’s walk into the trench of the stem, up along it, until the path forks, right and left: now you are in the outline dug around the four leaves of the clover. Take the path on one side or the other – it makes no difference – and stroll around the perimeter. Now climb up the sheltering walls that hid you, onto the turf border, and enter the leaves of the clover; look around, feel how you are at the centre of a symmetry that evokes perfection, good fortune, harmony with nature. Who could have traced out such a timeless place? Aliens, from off some flying saucer? A stone-age religious cult? The ancient Romans? No. Her name is Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and she was born in 1965 in Strasbourg. Thank you, Dominique.