Contemporary images—be they in the arts or the media—are for the most part “uncontrolled”; there is always room for the random, the imponderable. Image segment, image relay—it is precisely in this type of image that Pascal Haudressy has immersed himself. His marble sphere sculptures seem not so much to defy gravity (this has already been done, from Phidias to Rodin) as to go through it, to weight it. It is likewise a question of lines. Rodin said that a good sculpture must have infinity. With Haudressy, we go from a multitude of tangled lines to almost random ones. And yet it somehow all “holds” together and has even monumentalized itself. Because all statues of high quality incarnate the Latin verb “stare”; they are either enduring—or nothing. These are not mere marble soap bubbles but, in the words of Pascal, amino acids. That which is chaotic is not this perilous lack of balance but the physiochemical process of generating life itself; a quantum universe where everything is askew. Following Tony Cragg’s brilliant example (the tacit agreement of his structures with those of DNA), Haudressy gives statuary a whole new body—a molecular body of potentialities carrying flows of information, awaiting their realization in “life signs”. Calder and Tinguely have found in Haudressy an heir worthy of their fateful “blunders”.
What has been said about Haudressy’s sculptures goes for his electronic drawings as well; here too is it a question of uncontrolled lines. While the classics want for the perfect form—that of decoration—, we know that, since the advent of modern painting (the big one—the one that changed the collective vision), multiple lines have become the preference. An apple painted by Cézanne, a Giacometti portrait, a Picasso or a Bonnard nude or a combination painting by Rauschenberg all convey these shaky edges. Seurat even went so far as to vaporize the outlines of his figures. With Pascal Haudressy this old problem takes a new turn that now is dependent on the experimental capacities of new pixilized media. He himself speaks of “irregular drawing”. By intentionally upsetting the computer’s inking and immersing it in chaotic calculations it cannot handle, Haudressy has created a new type of contour drawing. With his “hedgehog outline”, thousands of points spring forth from a shape to construct and deconstruct an object’s boundaries ad infinitum—pulsations, frequencies and phases, and no longer measurable surfaces. Haudressy’s drawing (his drawing) is therefore temporal—an electronic graph. It is here that everything changes, and where the 21st century begins.

Text by Pierre Sterck