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Liliana Albertazzi
For more than twenty years now, Georges Rousse has enwrapped closed down places to regain their memory. Deserted places, abandoned, half in ruins, ready to the demolished or in the process of being redone. All await a new future ahead. Georges Rousse intervenes in this breach between the dilapidated past and the planned future. At the beginning of the 1980s, he invented characters inhabiting these places, climbing the stairs, the false beams, floating in the air. Very quickly this anamorphosis came to create planes interfering with space and perspective. Then, the characters were lodged, at times even imprisoned, within the fictional volumes created by these same procedures. As of 1984, these volumes became independent. Although human faces never fully disappeared from the artist's work, abstraction came to take their place and transform the approach. Drawings and painting were increasingly added to shape material serving as a counterpoint to the place, and these drawings and painting became photographic material. It is true that photography, from the outset, has been a medium that has gelled "showing" the viewer. But since the artist has populated the place with his characters, the photographs look more like documents, like a narration or report on the state of a given place. The abstraction of shapes has led to a new dimension, with painting, drawings, and later construction billing the intent on photographic observation. The photography concentrates on grasping the previously mentioned breach between the past and the future to which Georges Rousse seems to wish to confer a materiality.
The desire to grasp this instant comes to appear in the form of pure fiction, yet the use of anamorphosis is the logical outcome of this type of proposition. It was Baltrusaitis in his famous essay on the subject who said "The process is established like a technical curiosity yet it contains the poetry of abstraction, a powerful mechanism of optical illusion and the philosophy of artificial reality." He continues "It (anamorphosis) is an optical subterfuge where the seeming eclipses the real". In an interview with Jocelyne Lupien, Georges Rousse says he does not identify with the dictionary's definition of anamorphosis. In fact, his interest is not to render an object unrecognisable, although it does seem that the artist's attachment to this method may fit the definition given by Baltursaitis. Regarding the "poetry of abstraction", we can reiterate how it has come to provide a new way of looking at or considering architecture. The dismembering and recomposition put forward by anamorphosis covers the same semantic field as poetry. Moreover, in many of his works, Georges Rousse will make an explicit extrapolation in which he uses words and where the poetry takes care of its relation with architecture. In the previously mentioned interview, Rousse also says he is able to "inhabit a place" ephemerally through poetry. In Embrasure IX, belonging to the series where the name has to do with the structure of the works and therefore where what is photographed prevails over the place. On a sign, Rousse replaces the drawing with writing to account for the place. In other works, a single word is spread out, letter by letter, room by room. On these works, the artists' comments "Each one of the letters painted on the wall aiming to obtain the flattening of space. This is the opposite of anamorphosis which imposes the flattening of the drawing on the perspective". (…)
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