Guillaume Cabantous
Odile Ouizeman Gallery, Paris, France
Sand, flint, spar, flux – even the names of the raw materials used in the industrial glass-making process are spare and sharp-edged. Their transmutation into the viscous stuff of glass-blowing or the clear, hardened panes of a window has always carried a certain thrill for me. With his own sheets of glass – once car windshields, now gorgeous drapery bent, folded, and hung over a series of metal supports – Guillaume Cabantous transports the substance into yet another physical state.
It requires a certain violence to make the trapezoidal windshields malleable: the artist smashes them with a sledgehammer. Yet they only faintly echo the impact of a car accident; traces of initial violence don’t designate these as damaged objects. Where Cabantous has broken it, the material bends willingly into graceful ripples and folds – into a new incarnation of itself. The moment of impact is in the distant past, and almost inconsequential in light of our current encounter with the transformed sheets of glass.
One installation, ...I love Panamarenko, featured in an earlier show at the gallery, epitomizes this effect. Dutch sculptor Panamarenko (better known as Henri Van Herwegen) is known for his minutely engineered models of imaginary vehicles and balloons whose potential to function has never been tested. A triangular frame is draped with a swath of glass panes, the ensemble resembling the covered ribs of a giant zeppelin. It’s like happening upon the billowing remnants of a hot air balloon caught in the branches of a tree; what remains is so awe-inspiring it distracts from the horror of the accident – but only for a moment.
Cabantous’ best installations all work this way: a macabre scenario hovers in the back of our minds, but never gains enough substance to become the work’s sole subject. Inevitably, the artist’s arresting materials pull us back to the present moment. In one sculpture, six shattered windshields are suspended from butcher’s hooks. The hooks carry the menacing undertones of animals’ violent transition to the status of meat. But because they are made of the same burnished metal as the frames, shelves and posts we have grown accustomed to seeing in the artist’s other works, they retain their primarily neutral role. And the glass panes – thick, tinged with green, outlined in black – are too sterile to inspire the kind of shivers we experience at the sight of raw flesh.
The exhibition falls flat when the scenario takes precedence. In the final installation, two glass sheets are rolled into narrow cones, fastened by thick black collars and chained to a stake in the wall. Their leashes coil loosely on the floor, just waiting to be pulled taut. Changing his typical metal supports into highly specific props, Cabantous casts his glass creations in facile theatrical roles. It matters little whether the restrained objects are glass panes, wooden blocks, or any other item. Leashed, they disappear inside the scenario: we are obliged to regard them as giant menacing dogs that look as if, unrestrained, they might jump up at any moment.
We oscillate between horror and relief at the sight of a violent event, or its remains – disgust is, in a sense, the combined product of these emotions. In the same way, Cabantous’ broken objects force us to alternate between dismay and fascination. This sets off a loop of resonant associations and dynamizes his best work. With only one or the other, it remains simply tame.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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