Charlotte COSSON
Art as a present to the wild
2022

One could define Christophe Doucet as a forester artist. For about thirty-five years, he has been producing his sculptures among the pine, oak and alder trees of the French region called ‘les Landes’. First inspired by minimalism, he gradually moved away from that current to fully embrace figurative representation. Animated by a form of vital magic, the artist now shapes bodies for mostly animal spirits.

Christophe Doucet’s work progresses to the point of exhaustion: of his pencil strokes in his first sketches, then of photographed boundary stones, and finally of zoomorphic representations. Doucet works tirelessly in his studio. He creates his own tools, reproduces sculptures from others, meticulously splinters wood with his axe. Doucet perceives reality in seeing it unfold at his very hands.

He was a forester for more than twenty years. Every day, he would drive into the woods looking for boundary markers, and even created them when they were missing. This very semiology, a woodcutter’s, gave birth ten years later to a major installation, la Sauveté de Garbachet. In reference to a medieval use that consists in protecting the surroundings of sacred places, the artist had a one hectare area around a cabin in the heart of a forest registered in the cadastral plan. Far from limiting his initiative to simple paperwork, he then started a community volunteering project to restore the cabin and its well. The artistic aura of the whole was amplified in placing at the four cardinal points milestones made of traditional mortar topped with hare ears. There, just as when he builds a shelter for a sick oak tree or when he places a gold leaf on a centuries old tree about to be felled in Korea, Doucet contributes to preserving trees and the life they are home to. Anthropologist Anna Tsing indeed notes that the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene is mostly driven by the eradication of sheltering places where wildlife could have moved otherwise. 
Going against the grain of the world’s capitalistic order and its cycle of destruction, Christophe Doucet thus introduces a strategy of preservation, or healing. 

The artist, who is both aware of the impossibility to live without natural resources and of the necessity to preserve them, has devised a circular economy in order to produce artworks sustainably. His studio is nothing but the immense forest of the Landes. He explores it to bring back a sequoia struck by lightning, an uprooted oak tree, a cedar that died naturally, or a sweet chestnut tree someone gifted him. He also bought two hectares of the forest, where he finds the alder wood for his masks. If Doucet ever needs sandpaper, he grabs horsetail from the forest. When he needs wood from a young tree, he will pollard it on a waning moon, a traditional technique in agroforestry. This specific cut allows to saw branches without affecting the tree’s life. When he ultimately applies colour on his works, he uses his own mix of cottage cheese and natural pigments. American Natives inspired him this recipe, which keeps him from using artificial substances. 

Christophe Doucet remains very humble when he relates the birth of his monumental sculptures: picking a trunk, turning it upside down , inspecting it thoroughly— sometimes for years. Here a fork that look like legs or paws, some bough that appears like genitalia or snout, some knot turning into an eye. The ultimate step consists in revealing the being existing beneath in removing matter. In doing so, he brings to the fore the implacable logic of masks: if one cuts two horizontal lines into the wood to shape eyebrows, the form of a nose immediately manifests. The artist draws attention to what Tim Ingold calls ‘an emergent shape’ that directly emanates from the materials and tools used. Christophe Doucet’s works reveal rather than suggest and thus often seem to borrow from the aesthetics of the first peoples’ art forms. His approach that takes as a point of departure the heart of natural objects, help him overcome his fears of cultural misappropriation.

However, can this encounter with indigenous people be reduced to crafting artworks? Doucet’s art is indeed punctuated by well-identifiable figures, the rabbit being one particularly frequent. This animal represents the trickster one finds on every continent in Puck, the gnome, the American natives’ coyote, the smart child from sub Saharan Africa… Doucet also uses the shape of the mandorla, sometimes through a small boat, reminiscent of that which was used in the Egyptian cosmogony by the dead. It feels like Doucet might be looking for the universal shapes and symbols that transcend all civilisations. Far from the postmodern tendency to appropriate all forms, his works are about symbols that are revealing the universal language of a unified world. 

Some of Doucet’s pieces have a fire burning in some cavity, others are covered in wax from fast burnt candles. His fox with a bindi on the forehead contains a detachable procession stick. Other pieces somehow require that the ex-voto before them (flowers, apples…) be changed every now and then. There is however no obligation here: only an invitation. Still today, in Baumburg, some continue to decorate with flowers his Pelican. One may consider the difference between a superficial form of ecology and a deeper one like divergent dynamics: where does the impulse come from? This gap lies in the difference between “having to abide” by the rule of dominant institution and “feeling the impulse” to take care, i.e. between some order from above and a heartfelt desire. Getting in close contact with Doucet’s work amounts to feeling a profound desire to respect, to favour growth and embrace the freest form of living that is encouraged, not to say supported.

The artist remembers ever single piece of wood scattered across the floor of his studio. He can narrate the story of every tree that allowed the production of his multi-headed totems. Upon hearing him talking about his pieces as living beings, one immediately thinks of the foresters who call trees “subjects” and their distribution “population”, just like would animists. Upon seeing the artist in another state of consciousness, an altered one, giving birth to such a lively bestiary, one can only testify to his spiritual dimension. Doucet defines this as “second degree shamanism” in which “birds don’t sing through him but through his objects called sculptures.” Those very sculptures are the very medium of healing practices. This is how Doucet translates a song coming from the heart of forests and immemorial times into new forms intelligible for us. Before such animal representations, men are restored to their original place: one among many, young and immature in the grand frame of life as a whole, fascinated with all they have to learn and which have been reduced to silence: wildlife, irrationality, and magic.

By the way, who does the artist actually address today? When one visits his exhibitions in the middle of the woods, that question is raised even more profoundly. In offering his art to the animals living in Gascogne, it is as if he debunked anthropomorphism. The very first step towards modernity precisely consisted in placing human beings at the center of the world, knowledge and perceptions. Doucet changes that very perspective, and also works towards reconciliation, which could well foreshadow a societal change. While his pieces seem to mend the internal fracture resulting from the separation of humankind and the rest of the fauna, Doucet also seems to draw a bridge towards the invisible. In implanting objects whose aura modifies the energies in presence in places marked by brutality (hunting grounds, deforestation, the racket of chainsaws…), the shaman-artist facilitates the restoration of a balance between forces and reintroduces harmony where there was dissonance. In a more intimate way, in offering his bestiary to trees, birds and deer, Christophe Doucet gives back to the forest, the mother of his art and dreams, its most beautiful part. 

Charlotte COSSON, October 2021. Aica / ADAGP - Ekphrasis prize.
Traduction Mathias DEGOUTE