Henri Chopin

Body Sound Space

Quartz Studio is pleased to present Body Sound Space, the first solo show in Turin by the French artist Henri Chopin (Paris, France, 1922 – Norfolk, UK, 2008), curated by Eva Brioschi. The exhibition strives to give an account of the many paths that this multi-faceted, shaman-like artist took in order to cross the boundaries between the three elements in the title.

Body. This is Chopin’s medium to create his works of sound poetry. The throat, the tongue, the lips, the vocal cords, and the ribcage vibrate, move, and interact with the air. They click and quiver in an exercise about recovering the primitive, ancestral properties of language, emerging free and powerful from the artist’s stomach through his oral cavity.

Sound. The sound particles made through these exercises are the ground zero of vocabulary, syntax, grammar. The word becomes pure creative vital energy, without meaning.

Space. In the space, the body releases the creative urge. His tape recorder experiments, in which he recorded primordial sounds on tapes, then superimposed, cut out, and stuck together, were followed by sculptural works in which he recovers fragments of these tapes, which he terms “sensitive” (as imbued with energy, sound, and life) and mixes them with newspaper clippings, found objects, and marks to create collages and totemic sculptures.

Musical scores are created, made up of letters, words, and graphemes, returned to their signifying value, in a dance of textures, patterns, shapes, which set the pace of typed pages — called Dactylopoems — where typing becomes the mechanical, repetitive medium to give order to the chaos of the word. It removes its ethereal nature and imprisons it in set grids and structures. Over his lifetime, this visionary artist defied every form of prison, from his personal experience of the war and concentration camps to that of intellectual prisons of prejudice, diplomacies, and limitations. The man and the artist are a single entity. Creation through sound and word rendered concrete on paper is an ongoing pursuit of balance between chaos and order, freedom and control, machine and animal. The use of technology has let Chopin go where others have failed, freeing the artist from the tyranny of language.