Iron Passages

Iron Passages
Jean Clareboudt
1992
3 sculptures in steel, each one 200 x 200 x 52cm
Deposit of the National Collection of Contemporary Art
Born in Lyon in 1914, Jean Clareboudt died in Turkey in 1997.
Jean Clareboudt’s work is part of the series Iron Passages: a group of ten pieces carried out during the artist’s residence at the Calder Studio in Touraine from July 1991 to March 1992. The other seven sculptures were deposited at Montbellliard, Rennes, Nozay… With regard to the Iron Passages series, he recalled how impressed he had been on one of his journeys between the banks of the Loire and Jutland (Denmark) by the changes in the landscape and the many circular signs that caught his attention (large bales of straw, millstones, etc.).
The ten steel millstones are the crystallization of this thought in movement. In a rapport both of belonging to and tension with nature, Jean Clareboudt’s sculptures modify the landscape. Here the mills exchange their value with something sensitive, and become disconcerting machines. The weight and height of each disk impose their strong presence on the spectator. At the same time, a game is set in motion: empty and full alternate and start a dialogue. The artist creates an “active” void that invites one to bend one’s knees and discover a fragment of the landscape as if through a camera. The imposing sculpture is thus the opposite of a cloisters, it makes one start to move. Between each mill, a visual and physical trajectory recalls dancing of a sort. This work leaves us with a reading of the agricultural landscape, of time working non-stop.