Francis Dusépulchre (1934-2013)
Francis Dusépulchre was an art teacher who also pursued a career as a painter and sculptor. In 1968, abandoning his fantastical figurative approach, he turned to abstract sculpture, creating monochrome masonnite reliefs (compressed wood fibres) in which light plays on superimposed, concave or convex planes. The plastic poetry thus offered to the eye was to acquire a new dimension when the artist introduced tensioned wires (1979) and optical fibres (1983) into the composition. Co-founder of the Art Concret group in Hainaut in 1973.
Interested in monumental integration into the environment, he created works for the Mariemont museum, the park in the garden city of Trazegnies, the foyer of the Nivelles cultural centre, the University of Sart Tilman in Liège and soon for the Charleroi metro. As a synthesis of his work in this field, he presented the Botanique cultural centre in Brussels with a project for a monumental sculpture for the State administrative tower. Dusépulchre's art plays in a very personal way on the subtle articulations of bulging or swollen planes; "this is where cutting, hollowing out, or rather fine incision comes into play, without cruelty, inventive without emphasis. Dusépulchre practises this in a way that distances him from the sharp, radical gesturality of a Fontana as much as from ornamental arabesque. The hollowed-out line, with no moraine, runs, barely flares out, takes a comma-like diversions, frolics a little, not on a whim, but along a thrifty, premeditated path, fomented with a rare mastery".
Francis Dusépulchre has made his mark in the most original way in the international movement towards constructed, minimal and monochrome abstraction. Since the early 1970s, he has been constantly renewing his own plastic language, on the borders of painting and sculpture, Preoccupied above all with trapping the charms and mysteries of light and shadow through the supple geometries that he creates on a sort of subtly domed monochrome bas-reliefs, in which the cutting, the hollowing out, or rather the fine incision, without cruelty, inventive without emphasis, comes into play", notes the art critic Jean Pigeon. In these reliefs, packaged in Plexiglas boxes, the artist likes to stretch nylon or steel wires over the grooves, cracks and hollows that animate his compositions. Dusépulchre practises abstraction, distancing himself from both the sharp, radical gesturality of a Fontana and the ornamental arabesque," notes Jean Pigeon. The hollowed-out line, with no moraine, runs, barely flares out, allows itself a comma-like diversions, frolics a little, not on a whim, but according to a thrifty, premeditated course, fomented with a rare mastery." At the turn of the century, Francis Dusépulchre developed his monumental transparencies, sculptures assembled from carbon fibres suspended between the walls of Plexiglas boxes. And since 2004, the artist has been exploring the effects produced by adding sand to his pigments, in series of materialistic canvases that constitute veritable installations. It’s hardly surprising that such surface animation and a poetry of forms so independent of any figurative representation have led the artist to want to occupy the wall and bring architectural spaces to life. Several projects devised by the artist and various commissions carried out in the Walloon region (Trazegnies, Nivelles, Grand-Hornu, Charleroi, Jambes, Mariemont) and on the Sart-Tilman university site in Liège, have provided ample proof of his plastic gifts and his truly poetic ability to arouse serene tension through a secret but evocative dialogue between light and shadow.
BELGIAN ART IN THE 20th CENTURY, Serge Goyens de Heusch, Editions Racine 2006