Anne Zali
Was Jacques Riousse a raw artist? Raw, in the sense that Jean-Michel Bouhours defines it, quoting Dubuffet: ‘an individual whose moods and impressions are delivered raw with their very vivid smells, like eating a herring without cooking it…’, raw in his posture ‘closed in on itself, quasi-autistic vis-à-vis an alienating world, from which he protects himself thanks to a personal symbolic system’.
Of course, he doesn’t belong to any school or artistic movement, he escapes all academic training, and it’s with sovereign freedom that he draws his inspiration in turn, according to the materials he uses, from the surrealist assemblages of a Picasso, the fantasies of a Miro, the expressionist line of a Rouault, the taste for recycling of a Bruce Corner or a Rauschenberg. But his real, unique and wild passion is for the materials themselves: stone, wood, coral, debris, shards of glass, salvaged objects, coat racks, soles, burners, springs, carburettors. There is nothing that does not find favour in his eyes, nothing that does not transform in his hands and become a child of a new Creation, rediscovered turbulence, a burst of form, the emergence of a face that sometimes escapes the classification of kingdoms.
It’s as if, in a vision very close to that of Teilhard de Cardin, he felt summoned to this place: to work endlessly to spiritualise matter, to open his eyes to these chains of transfiguration in the making. Through his sculptures, the clamour of a living people rises up from the abyss.
Can we really speak of a raw artist here? One might rather salute the insolent independence of an artist intent on seeking, as close as possible to his truth, to express what he hears in the gasps, heaves, pulsations, murmurs, hoarsenesses and tremors of an intranquil world, close to his ear as a Seer?
I don’t think he’s a raw artist, I think he’s unclassifiable, definitely unclassifiable, and it’s in the place of this solar freedom that he continues to beckon us, to launch this wild protest towards us.