Forest Amuletum- New Sculptures by Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staelens

FOREST AMULETUM By Randall Morris For me silence has always had its own music. I love films that open with a warm sweep of silence, orchestral in itself before the intensity of any kind of action begins. We think when things are peaceful in our lives they are then silent. They aren’t. Silence is only real in Nature when it is attached to a place that has lost its sense of time. When Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staelens put their sculptures outside, for a brief time, before the work travels to the noise of civilization, they are silent in the breeze, insect calls and bird cries. The thick atmosphere of an ancient church perhaps disturbed only by the flutter of wings of a pigeon in the apse.

The quietude of an earth that holds its dead to its bosom as if they were sleepers. That awed hush just before a warm rainstorm. I see their sculptures this way as three dimensional pauses in time. That moment when time catches up with itself. Follow that quiet camera into their studio…The silence is outside. Inside there is the noise of music and human voices. This is the place where the pieces are born and finished and the hush waits outside, hugging the house to itself in a long slow unseen fugue.

The sculptures of Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staelens are not afraid of darkness and light. Like their makers they have seen a fair share of both. They move in mist and chiaroscuro and clarity with impunity. They are expressionistic yet they hold up elegantly under the most critical scrutiny. They are mythical, they are not whimsical. They are consciously created inhabitants of a dangerous forest. In dappled sunlight they blend with dust motes, honeycolored light and the slow talk of old trees. They can be forceful, they can be meditative, they are always enigmatic.

The Staelens moved to Jailhac in Auvergnes in 2002. They were drawn to the materials found on the land. They needed and loved the huge quiet, and always in this place there had been the grand and brooding presences of the forest and the volcanoes, both providing influence, materials and colors in their crushed and powdered stones. There are less than forty people living in the village. And many cows. The house had been in Sylvain’s family from his great-grandparents and so there was a personal history also felt in this isolated location..

Close to the house/studio is the Notre Dame de Claviers Chapel, built before 1109 from the same volcanic stone as used in their sculptures. In it is a crucifix and fourteen stone stations of the cross, some of them carved by a nineteenth century hermit named Francois Lesmarie.

You can see it from their windows. It was definitely a formative influence. There was also a very famous carving of a Virgin in the chapel, later removed to another location. But the robed influence of that dark figure has never left Jailhac or the imaginations of the Staelens.

She is one of their muses. Nearbye is the Bois de Jailhac. The Staelens call it “the forest”.

There is a difference between influence and appropriation in an artists’ contact with the world. Primitivism was always a war between these two ideas. The Staelens live in the contemporary world, a world made smaller by the Internet and the relative ease of travel.

Non-Western countries like Mexico where they travelled and Africa where Ghyslains’ family 3 < FOREST AMULETUM