André du Colombier. A lyrical point of view

André Paliard Iscu was born in 1952 in Barcelona. In the early 1970s, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He chose to change his name to du Colombier (“of the dovecote”), decided to become an artist and held his first individual exhibition, entitled Modestie, Compétence, et Efficacité (Modesty, Competence and Efficiency) at the Galerie Eric Fabre in Paris in 1977. He died in Paris in 2003.

His earliest surviving work is a vertical silver line: a trace of pencil lead on a sheet of black sandpaper. As if left when sharpening a writer’s tool, it is an anti-drawing against the grain. Other early works are sequences of black-and-white photographs documenting dynamic actions with household utensils, or, by contrast, static and exposed objects, defamiliarised under clinical white light.

Standard-sized sheets of reflective Chromolux paper in various colours became over time the artist’s medium of choice, used as a backdrop for handwritten or Letraset texts: odd words, equivocal phrases and cryptic, coded sentences. Another genre in du Colombier’s practice was his mise-en-scènes. Composed of toys, tourist souvenirs and accessories arranged and performed on café tables or in other casual situations, these were often staged for an invited audience of one and never documented.

The exhibition’s titular phrase ‘lyrical point of view’ is a title of the text accompanying du Colombier’s show at Patricia Dorfmann’s gallery in Paris in 1999. It captures the position of an artist whose elusive oeuvre keeps confronting us, free and equal, with the ever-evolving work of interpretation.