ET L’HORIZON S’ENFUIT D’UNE FUITE ÉTERNELLE !…: Sylvain Ciavaldini

It vibrates. In the light of darkness, it vibrates tirelessly. The horizon. Streak at the end of the world, original line, vibrates to the rhythm of the night. No longer a chain of mountains, a hill or calm sea, it is sound, dance and light; gesture, trace and memory. At the light of darkness, the horizon is no longer the frontier for the retina, but rather the open door to vision. We set out on our journey and the path becomes an initiatory dream. 

The journey begins at nightfall, a transition conducive to introspection. As if the compromised experience of the world inevitably led to the experience of oneself, we enter. Once we’ve crossed the doorstep, we enter, and the ambivalence of reality imposes itself immediately. Day and night. Positive and negative. The other and the self. 

It is a clearing kissed by the moon at night. Targeted light makes its way through the darkness and when it reaches the material– tree branches, leaves and grass– it reveals the form, reveals it rather than imposing it. What follows is the act of drawing, the capturing of this volatile moment, in Rotring on paper. Freezing the experience of the night, what it does to the form, what it does to sight, and all the mysteries that follow. At the light of darkness, the real passes through the filter of the imagination that delineates fantastical landscapes. 

Sylvain Ciavaldini made the study of form– genesis and becoming– the core of his artistic practice. Since his beginnings in the 1990s, his research has mainly materialized in drawing– a drawing whose potentialities and margins he experiments with. From time to time, his experimentations have led him to sculpture, design and painting, yet drawing never fails to shape his research. He has explored its techniques and materials, histories and symbolisms, and continues to do so. Nourished by an in-depth study of some of the great masters (Dürer, Bosch, Uccello, Giotto, Piranesi, Cézanne, etc.), he draws his inspiration from a very contemporary iconography, with a rigorous practice of collecting digital images. Here, the images succeed one another and take us through art history, at times to the landscape painters, to the study of the still life, to the magic of chiaroscuro.

The drawing is at once intimate, with small formats nestled in wooden structures– lines in space– and monumental, as it invades the walls and overwhelms the visitor. It is traditional while remaining experimental–both technically and formally. It is sensitive representation and symbolic evocation which constitutes perhaps the double essential vocation of drawing, and more generally of the art, from the first lines deposited on the cold rock of ancestral caves, to the recent multimedia and performative environments of our century. 

The night follows its course as the day inevitably returns. Little by little, the sky brightens and before the sun even reveals its first rays, darkness diminishes. In this in-between, the shadows emerge and grow, memories of a dying obscurity, resistance of reminders from the night. It is the last step of the journey, the experience becomes a memory, the shadows of the recollection still linger but will soon vanish. We exit. The dream has been lived, but the images remain.  

Grégoire Prangé

Lectoure, juillet 2021

¹Rimbaud A., « Soleil et Chair », in Cahiers de Douai, 1870.

Translated by Katia Porro.