Curriculum Vitae
THE VERTICAL ELEPHANT DANCE / LA DANSE VERTICALE DE L ELEPHANT
Français: lien: LA DANSE VERTICALE DE L ELEPHANT
English: lien: The Vertical elephant Dance
An intimate way to see the world / Une façon intime de voir le monde
English: lien An intimate way to see the world : Une façon intime de voir le monde
Français lien: Une façon intime de voir le monde
Sandro Godel, born on February 10, 1961 in Estavayer-le-Lac, Fribourg, Switzerland. Artistic formation was self-taught. In 1994-1995, he was the winner of the competition of the Canton of Fribourg for a training period of one year at the International City of Arts in Paris, France, (Studio Tinguely). From 1996, he taught engraving in his studio in Domdidier, Fribourg, Switzerland. In 2004, he obtained a scolarship for a training period of improvement of six months in Berlin, Germany. At the beginning of 2008, he obtained a scolarship from the canton of Fribourg for a training period of six months at the Studio Red-House in New-York .
Sandro Godel, né le 10 février 1961 à Estavayer-le-Lac/Fribourg. Formation artistique continue en Autodidacte. Lauréat du concours du canton de Fribourg pour un stage d'un an à la Cité internationale des Arts de Paris, 1994-1995 (Atelier Tinguely). Dès 1996 donne des cours de gravure dans son atelier de Domdidier/Fribourg. Obtention d'une bourse pour un stage de perfectionnement de six mois à Berlin en 2004. Obtention d'une bourse du canton de Fribourg pour un séjour de 6 mois à l'Atelier Red-House à New-York au début de l'année 2008.
Sandro Godel, geboren am 10. Februar 1961 in Estavayer-le-lac / Freiburg (CH), eignet sich als Autodidakt permanent Wissen an. Erwählter Preisträger des Kunstwettbewerbs des Kantons Freiburg für einen einjährigen Aufenthalt in der „Cité internationale des Arts“ von Paris (Atelier Tinguely), 1994-1995. Ab 1996 erteilt er in seinem Atelier in Domdidier / Freiburg (CH) Kurse seiner Maltechnik (Gravur/Malerei). Im weiteren erhielt er zwei Stipendien des Kantons Freiburg, eines für einen Aufenthalt von sechs Monaten in Berlin, 2004, und ein anderes für einen Aufenthalt von sechs Monaten im Atelier Red-House in New York, ab Februar 2008.
PRIX
par la Fondation Bedikian, Paris, pour son oeuvre en peinture et en gravure. 2006
REALISATION
d'oeuvres intégrées à l'architecture.
1er prix du concours pour l'animation artistique du nouveau bâtiment des Services Industriels de la ville de Fribourg en 2006.
COLLECTIONS DANS LE DOMAINE PUBLIC
Instruction publique du canton de Fribourg Groupe E, Fribourg
Peinture. Encres et pigments sur papier.
WRITINGS / ECRITS / MEMORANDUM
"AN INTIMATE WAY TO SEE THE WORLD"
Dedicated to painting, Sandro Godel isn’t afraid to make eve y effort to express further the deepness of his emotions. Learning or inventing all kinds of techniques allows him to translate plastically his intentions as accurately as possible. The proper use of the materials offered by our world is a parameter intimately linked to his artist’s profile.
In him live together a sustained interest for the history of cultures, for their religious spirituality and philosophy. This precious background helps him to face himself during his frequent travels. The continuous exceeding of one’s limits is part of self-knowledge.
It prompts his desire to paint, to share finally his commitment on the deep meaning of human life. Sandro, like Tapiès, is attached to the non-representational tradition; the subject of the painting should never be revealed, not even named .Painting is to actually touch the thing that is the distinctive feature in all by establishing a direct relation between the viewer and emotion, before he refers to shapes and colours. While inscribed in European culture, the thought and plastic expression of Sandro Godel are strongly inspired and enriched by the oriental vision of the world.
Long before the subtle and light gestures brush gently the precious papers with indelible inks, a work of preparation, both long-term and physical, has been completed. The rice paper pasted on the canvas makes up his special technique to put into relation such personal visions with all his expertise.
It’s at this moment precisely that the love of the painter for poetry is revealed. Pictorial metrics are practised on chiaroscuro surfaces, like an invitation to follow his thought and his creative process. Everything is there but the theme and the colours can only be found in the look that we take at his work. We must enter the silence of the moment, where the composition was created to understand the richness of the universe we are being transmitted. At this instant, a fusion of spirituality and emotion calls out to us to discover a sensual love story with its little narrative accounts: an encounter with lost icons is told by a subtle play on the effects of light and by pictorial gestures done again and again.
Carmen Reolon
"THE VERTICAL ELEPHANT DANCE"
Sandro Godel, a dancing elephant ? An attempt at explanation between the Genesis of the Gesture and the Wall of Revelation. Rather a return to dance, therefore to painting.
Painting: the body is its danced reflection on the mirror of the fixed surface. A state of active solitude, an essential state.
Prolegomena to the initial dreamt gesture, the initial dis-location. The origins, it’s the location. Original location in front of the mirror.
Taking-off, from the ground as well as from the fixed image. Starting with the desire to breathe and pant. To Vibrate.
Paul Valéry wrote “Once the aim attained, the matter finished, the movement which was somehow inscribed in the relationship that our body has with the object and with our intention, stops. Its resolution contained its extermination: we couldn’t neither conceive it nor execute without the presence and help of the idea of an event that would be its end.”
He writes this in DEGAS DANCE DRAWING.
Before the take-off: the panting, the vibration. In this double dynamics of panting and vibrating, the body longs for the air-stream of breath and experiences the desire of elevation.
From the horizontality attached to the ground, it prefigures the verticality, a verticality bound to be hopping, since it won’t bear for long the ontological gravity, unless it plays with the trick of mechanical hanging. A complete imitation of the sexual act. The place above all of the weight of flesh and fantasy, including transfiguration. The organ in the sense of the surface.
Dancing is to show the tiredness of the body, heavy in its organic destiny. That’s why the elephant dance is ironic, between a carcass, raised dust and earth revealed.
An ironic wisdom, an antidote for all metaphysical utopias. The ground: the horizontality the gravity the landscape the paradox of the lying position, the conscience of being at the most cruel. The mythological literature is obvious: the mud, the swarming, the extraction from water towards air, the elevation, far from the snake, the use of verticality so much longed for, to see farther. Thus our evolution can be explained: crawling, standing up, becoming an agile biped. Overplaying the sight and movement to the detriment of the sense of smell, like the species’ practical modernity. The symbolic ratio of height / width? Ongoing, recurring, never settled. Especially since very quickly the biped stroller wants to tell about the depth, the third parameter of the Euclidean cube, where lays a beautiful fear: to be confined in a volume he doesn’t understand. In it, the stroller moves about cautiously. He tries to draw its outline, to imagine it. Painting is born.
Painting? It’s a flattening, a depth, an illusion, recitative asides, a desire of speech, the nostalgia of dance, of photography. Yes, painting is photography, a trap for photons. Light captured which impresses as much as it shapes. In the night, the body crouches down. Once the day returns, it instinctively rises, under the spell of the luminous possibility of drawing and colour. Painting is photography since the coloured volume has been mastered. The choreography of dream is finally shown in a gesture permanently desperate to imagine itself in a carnal substance to outlive putrefaction and disintegration. Even the dancing body, braving gradually the religious precepts of the attachment to the creeping gravity, even this body insists on having its photograph taken. Frozen in its freedom of movement. The statement of the ironic elephant dance. To paint: surface, medium, wall, matter, thought and frenzy, the ghost of dance. The materiality of abstract painting – when there is still fortunately substance to be experienced – holds the ghost of the ideal choreography. This spectre, it’s the gesture. To start again, to build up frantically. An idea of verticality. It’s at last the confrontation to the wall. The wall at the back of the antique stage. The completion of a gesture. Because the gesture needs a verticality to confront.
In Sandro Godel’s studio, there is a build-up of canvasses and etchings. Choreographic frenzy of the original gesture. Scratches, drawing, photography. Frenzy of proliferation of the image in this way tracked down.
In the studio, paintings and book-objects, works of small and big sizes form an image in motion. An exciting collection. A concretion of gestures, techniques, more or less patient researches. A temporary deposit, always temporary, of techniques and knowledges.
What is the wall to Sandro Godel ? Surprise: it is as much an horizontal surface of impression (etching), he says, as a reflecting verticality.
A self-portrait, consequently, an extract from painting? No, not really, he answers. And, yet. The wall is not only architecture. It is also an immediate carrier of meaning. Finely worked, damp, smooth, ruined, political, mirroring an intention. THE WALL is close to THE WALK, by a sign “K”, which recalls the motion of walking. There is in the apparently fixed wall, a frenzy of movement, liveliness, where dreams and the reality of the body meet, mingle and fertilize
We have trouble and we find it extremely difficult to admit architecture as the scene of confrontation between the living (to live in it, to dance in it) and the fatal promise (the minerality of the final grave)The painter, him, knows how to dance in this motionlessness. Vertical painting, horizontal writing. To play with walls.
Henri Michaux : « With painting, I feel young, I am old in writing. » In 1976, the poet who had tried everything, testified “How difficult it has become to move those blocks”
Henri Michaux shouldn’t be read chronogically. “I don’t have to live anymore on my nerves, in revolt, and always suffering to look into my problems”. This, he wrote in 1935 to Jules Supervielle. Dance is from now on the possibility to confront yourself to something. The liberation of the self to enter in an infinite, face to face with the matter, the wall. Because one day, one has to choose a side to dance in, to outline, to testify, to inscribe oneself in the negation of nothingness, to decide to paint, to engrave, to draw, to photograph what we are dancing here in the living world, the only conceivable dimension.
Isn’t there thus in Michaux, the essence of the abstract gesture turned into action when he notes : « My pleasure is to let something come, to make it appear, and then disappear”. Dance, metamorphosis of sex AND painting, composition.
Dance. Dance on the surfaces, such as intertwined marks sketched by Trisha Brown in pencil.
Tensions? Ideas of the trace where the tensed body paints: on the wall. Where the paintings once done and fixed are hung.
Trisha Brown in an interview given to Hendel Teicher in 1998 in Manhattan on her sketches:
“The only relation with dance is the speed with which I drew them and the target I set myself, that is to say the making of a perfect square. And obviously, that’s not what I’ve done. I like the shapes that the squares have become, and the dynamics of the diagonal inside them. The space between the squares, the virgin spaces.” The choreographer, as always, has captured painting so well: virgin spaces to repopulate beyond sterile geometries.
Marc Rothko had himself also declared that “plasticity is the quality with which the sense of movement is depicted in a painting”. That’s how Sandro Godel dances in his painting, crossing hypothetical squares to extract, while dancing, the movement of the apparent gesture.
Jacques Sterchi
