Points of Passage The Sculpture of Paul de Monchaux

There is a new work on display in Paul de Monchaux’s garden studio. Volute VI (2018) occupies the centre of the space, like a new kid in the class. Plaster white, ready to be cast in bronze, it sits atop its plinth with swanlike mock-bashful confidence. Tilly, the family dog, gives a sage nod of approval, while the surrounding sculptures are mute, as if awaiting a reshuffle. Volute VI is the latest in a series of works taking as their starting point the decorative scrolls found at the top of Ionic columns in classical architecture. To make the work, De Monchaux has taken a section derived from the construction of a root-two rectangle on a complex journey through space. A graceful, insistent circuit is forged, with determined avenues followed by gentle detours and swift double backs. From a particular angle, the symmetry of the piece clicks into place enabling a sudden stasis, a momentary resolution, before it again assumes its sinuous progression through asymmetry, like ‘a swimmer in space’.1

Volute VI is an assured summation of eight decades of artistic endeavour: a career in which Paul de Monchaux has applied the objective rigours of geometry and measurement to forge sensuous, ambiguous forms in time and space. In many ways, the circuitous flourishing of Volute VI parallels the shape of De Monchaux’s development as an artist: a nub of journeys and ideas enriching one another across time. His course has bowed to accommodate the convergence of teaching and family commitments, before emerging in a late flowering of creativity during so-called ‘retirement’. In establishing an overview of this significant yet underacknowledged practice, an underlying interest in notions of passage and juncture surfaces: one driven by a desire to traverse boundaries in search of fresh points of connection.

Standing in the studio, looking across at recent work, De Monchaux returns with ease to the vivid intensity of early memories. Born in Montreal in 1934 to entrepreneurial parents, he recalls an itinerant childhood, attending 15 schools across Ireland, Australia, Canada, the USA and South America. De Monchaux embraced each upheaval, drawing particular inspiration from the physical experience of travelling on huge passenger ships. He describes with awe the slow movement of a massive liner, ‘a wall of shaped steel’, tugged into dock. He recalls his tiny frame leaving solid ground to enter the narrow gangway and move up into the huge vessel; and the freedom to roam the ship for weeks on end, senses heightened by shifts in perspective, scale and climate. Equally close to the surface is the material memory of an impressive feature in the landscape close to one temporary home in Fairfax, Virginia, near Washington DC. This vertical cut exposed a seam of clay that De Monchaux worked with his hands. He produced the shapes that his brother, later an architect, would develop into infrastructure: a miniature civilisation of sorts.

On leaving school aged 17, De Monchaux moved to New York City in 1952. He worked as an assistant in a fashion photography retouching studio and attended sculpture classes at the Art Students League during the evenings. It was an informal studentship, which he supplemented with frequent trips to the Museum of Modern Art, where he encountered the work of Constantin Brancusi for the first time. Yearning for greater discipline, and aware of the significance of European (and particularly British) developments in modern sculpture, he travelled to London in 1955 to accept a place at the Slade School of Art. Here, teaching encouraged the strict scrutiny of the figure under the watchful eye of Professor Alfred Gerrard, with regular crits from visiting artists including Reg Butler, F. E. McWilliam and, more occasionally, Henry Moore. Measurement and proportionality were paramount. Working directly from the life model, the students plotted observations in clay onto precise metal armatures: a flowering of figuration from a geometric core. This analytic and structured process was of fundamental importance to De Monchaux, and the subtle gradations between abstraction and figuration, internal and external form, have fed his practice ever since.

Alongside his studies, De Monchaux continued to extend his terms of reference. During the holidays he was employed at a quarry in Dorset where he produced handmade kerbstones for local footpaths, gratefully accepting offcuts for his own work. Frequent trips to galleries and museums enhanced a growing awareness of his role as a tiny cog in a relentless global progression of creativity. He marvelled at archaic Greek and early Egyptian sculpture in the British Museum, the Auguste Rodin works from the Victoria & Albert Museum on loan to the Tate Gallery, and early Renaissance architecture on a trip to Florence, discerning across time and discipline ‘a common enterprise’.2 On graduation in 1958, De Monchaux accepted a teaching position at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, Nigeria, where he lived for two years with his wife, the fellow artist Ruth Blackett, and their infant son, Stephen.3 Although the students were keen to learn about Western developments, he organised guided field trips to Jos, Osogbo, Issie, Tada, Benin and Ife, finding exceptional examples of indigenous art to inspire his students. By proxy, this experience extended and enriched his own understanding of sculpture.

Examples of De Monchaux’s early work can be found around his home.