VARGUES & KEROUANTON
Is the forest an open and welcoming place
2003

Christophe Doucet, sculptor.

Is the forest an open and welcoming place for the city person? An entertaining and regenerative place for the urban world? No, on the contrary, "la forêt des Landes", of which we can speak of since we were born there, it is a place for a magnificent and violent fight during which the tree is tamed, dominated while battling against the woodman who is his master and executioner. Christophe Doucet's "woods" are chosen, cut, exploded, tense, skinned, chopped up, gilt, aluminized, born of that fight which is rough, harsh, enjoyable and vital, -with no nostalgia whatsoever.
 
Forest is anxiety, like in the fairy tales of our childhood; unknown, immense and dark like the wolves den. Forest is also hard work, confrontation. That forest where one must live, sways the peoples, their tools and their shelters. One finds huts against the rain, the cold or to wait. In the forest one hits: there are tools for that, the iron ax goes straight into the wood, and severs. One puts steel and wood togeher, all tools are born that way.
 
Is there a tradition in "la forêt des Landes"? Maybe not... So what? One should try to know why; one should question time, and duration. One should pretend that time is long. Here, the forest is new; the woodmen are new, -almost. What could go on for a long time, here or elsewhere, where everything is new, foregone, exploited; when one is himself new, foregone, exploited or exploiting? Pieces of wood, shapes coming out of a tree. Pristine... well, what could be pristine today?
 
With Doucet you'll find a bestiary of gigantic blackbirds, votive shapes yes, but to whom? Strange axes, quixotic scissors, unlikely tools which could be used to trangress the use of a straight trunk, put together again. This is the way to attack wood, to have it disgorge: the crosshatchings, the open fire, the bloody fruits, the iron stuck on a branch. All the violence, all the beauty, all of a man's desire.

Catherine VARGUES & Jean-Louis KEROUANTON, Taller, Jully 2003.
in Christophe Doucet "landes", 18 septembre - 31 octobre 2004, Musée Renoir - Domaine des Collettes, Cagnes-sur-Mer.