Anywhere but Here

Julien Segard arrived in Kolkata sometime in the summer of 2015, months before his solo at Experimenter in August. It was his first time in the city and he was between places - Delhi, where he lived, Marseilles, his hometown and finally Kolkata, where he would soon relocate to work on the show. Much has changed between his nebulous plans then and his final showing in the form of Anywhere But Here, but the question of place still underscores the exhibition title. This is fitting not only because Julien’s personal instances of displacement appear to have left a mark on his practice but also since place plays a fine but definite role in his oeuvre.

Much of what he makes, for instance, tends to rely on materials he finds wherever he is. In part this has to do with his excitement over unusual materials and the element of chance involved in discovering them. It also relates to his eagerness to look at and sensually absorb his immediate surroundings. To him, reality is important and everything he makes emerges out of things he has seen - his “bridge” series, which grew out of an on-site drawing is a testament to this. The initial set of sketches that started it was a study of a flyover in a ghettoized French suburb. What fascinated Julien about it was the sooty colour of its underbelly, blackened by the garbage burnt under it. “The black - matte and intense - brought out... revealed... the geometry of the architecture, its sharp surface edges”, he says. But there was more. What drew him to the place was also its specific setting - in a precarious neighbourhood - and the scene that unfolded below the bridge. “Against the black background was a discarded sofa, a flock of homeless people huddled on and around it - sitting, burning things, smoking. The whole scene was like a show... absurd but also fascinating.” However, none of these more outre elements percolated /ESSAY into his drawings of the place and what he took back instead was the bridge motif. He returned again and again to the space and drew multiple versions of the same flyover, always looking up from underneath. Even after having shaken off his obsession with it, a drawing of the bridge still remained pinned to his studio wall in Delhi.

For this show he went back to the bridge, reworked versions of it, focusing on parts rather than the whole. He recreated its blackness for Anywhere But Here - the large, asymmetrically framed painting that lends the show its name - and its sharp edges for Divide, Construct, Deconstruct - a cluster of fragmented bridge portraits. His palette, basic and earthy, is consistently austere, his medium of mark making a Spartan combination of charcoal, chalk and oil colours. The surfaces used to draw on include pieces of fabric, card boards and pages from books picked up from the three cities to which he travelled. This frugality with colour and material lends a sense of renouncement to the works. There is no room for excess here but the restraint feels more of an abdication than forced abstinence. As an artist, Julien says he’d like to do much with as little as possible. His intent is to limit his interventions, interfere little and allow the materials he uses - often humble and plain - to show through.

Nowhere is this impulse to hold back more evident than in his sculptures. The first among the three on display is called Under the Skin I and consists of a long, red, sinewy branch propped on three wooden legs. He found the branch on a field not far from the gallery, he tells me. It was in keeping with what he was looking for, something curvaceous and organic to contrast with the straight line structures of his drawings. Under the Skin II is a second take on a branch-based composition, where the structure is more elaborate. The branch rests atop one of three wooden planks propped against each other to form a capital “N”. Under it is an unbroken, undulating wire formation, also in the shape of a sort of “n”. Each element of the sculpture touches the other circuitously but nothing is bound, there are no nailed joints and each point of contact is delicate. What keeps the arrangement erect is thus, the artist’s careful tweaking with the effects of gravity. The objective here was to find balance and trust it.

In a previous, unrelated conversation, Julien had mentioned his admiration for the functional structures built by the street dwellers he encountered in India. In the face of my non-white skepticism at this privileged othering, he emphasized only the elegance of things created with the most basic of items, found close at hand. “In a perfect world, artists would similarly be able to go anywhere and make things only with the things they found there, without adding anything extraneous.” It is understandable therefore, why the exhibition literature mentions the 60’s Italian art movement Arte Povera (or “Impoverished Art”) as one of Julien’s possible influences. Ideologically, he shares much with the works of artists clubbed together by critic Germano Celant for his 1967 show in Genoa. The most noteworthy among these is Julien’s value for process over production and his preference for juxtaposing organic and inert substances. He acknowledges the primacy the movement allowed commonly available materials, but seems hesitant about declaring it a source of inspiration.

As a viewer, I found myself spending a great deal of time around the sculptures displayed at the show. They captivated me especially /ESSAY because I found them difficult; neither relented to explanations, nor broke down to easily understandable forms despite being seemingly straightforward and frill-free. As I walked around them wondering what they meant, I wondered also about how they were made, how they remained taut and upright. They reminded me - tacitly - about my own body and its relationship with gravity. The process of looking and becoming aware of our bodies moving around objects is historically important to viewing art but often viewers like me - our preoccupation with extracting meaning - neglect these physically contemplative emotions that sculptures are capable of eliciting.

Looking at the first sculpture, spread across the pit midway into the gallery, I thought also about how fortuitous finding such a branch, of that exact size and form, is. Discoveries of the kind are not only a crucial moment in the course of making art but also an important determinant of how it is perceived by the viewer. For how can an understanding of the import of such a finding to the work not influence the way you envision the latter’s conception, its making and the sequence of events around it? Also significant, is the sense of wonder such a discovery has instilled into a work of art and in terms of it, in the otherwise anaesthetized space of a white cube. A work’s ability to amaze is often seen as a mark of frivolity but amazement is a complex emotion, experienced differently by different people; to discard its strength is to deny the spectrum of sentiments art is capable of inspiring.

The display at Anywhere But Here consists of a total of seven works, all made this year and for the show. Typically, the newness demanded by a set of works made for a solo tends to drive artists to novelty. Instead, Julien travelled back to images previously abandoned. It may be said that the exhibition, as an event, allows for such returns. It offers a juncture at which works and ideas haphazardly accumulated in the studio may be seen and organized. Beyond the meaning-making narratives it allows to be forged amidst the artworks displayed, therefore, the exhibition also provides a context for the artist to apprehend their own practice. A showing is always a moment in the artist’s oeuvre. Julien’s practice, for instance, includes things the exhibition didn’t put on view or even hint at. Even the works exhibited are likely to be returned to and changed around - perhaps profoundly - over time. The spatial exclusivity suggested in the show title is therefore a nod also to the special circumstances of an exhibit. This exhibition - like all exhibitions - is only a fleeting moment in the lifeline of the artist and some of his works. Seen at a moment anywhere but here, the picture might alter dramatically.

Parni Ray lives and writes in Kolkata