Peter Sacks est né et a grandi en Afrique
du Sud pendant les années de l’Apartheid. Son travail
est profondément marqué par ses origines et par sa
relation permanente à l’Afrique.
Sacks, également auteur de cinq livres de poésie, incorpore
profondément dans ces toiles des poèmes entiers et d’autres
textes tapés à la main sur des bandes de lin, morceaux
de carton, déchiré, articles de journaux, vêtements,
parties de boites FedEx.
Dans l’œuvre réalisée pour PIECE UNIQUE, il
tire parti de sa collaboration avec Peter Brook pour la scénographie
de la pièce Sizwe Banzi est mort, traduite de la pièce
sud-africaine de Athol Fugard, John Kani et Winston Ntshona. Le grand
carton, se référant à la série des Townships,
entreprend une représentation « magique » d’une « Ville
du futur » africaine.
---------------------------------
Born in Port Elizabeth (South Africa) in 1950.
Lives and works in France and USA.
Peter Sacks was born and raised in South Africa during the decades
of Apartheid. His work is deeply marked by his origins and by his
ongoing relation to Africa. In this, his second show at Piece Unique,
he confronts both the hope and the ongoing suffering of the continent,
both in itself and as an embodiment of our global experience at large.
His paintings,
that will be shown at piece unique variations, move between the
sense of a history made of words and
human actions (as
in those of the Truth and Reconciliation trials in South Africa after
the early 1990’s), and a mute history in which war, death,
displaced or dead persons and creatures threatened with extinction,
as well as the silent presences of ancestors – all appear.
Among those ancestors, as if witnesses to the trial, Sacks includes
as well a series of other “displaced” persons, most notably
the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, a victim of Stalin’s oppression,
as well as Paul Celan, and Franz Kafka (whose Trial is a central
buried text in and on some of the works).
Sacks, also
the author of five volumes of poetry, incorporates deep into the
body of these paintings, many materials
that are “buried,” as
in the shallow grave or the resurrective field of the surface: these
include whole poems and other texts manually typed on strips of linen,
pieces of torn cardboard, hand-made and machine-made lace, news articles,
clothing, parts of FedEx boxes. In this sense the canvases become
ritual objects, making up debris-fields whose ingredients have undergone
the slow “trial” of remaking, and whose bodies incorporate
multiple strata of recoverable and unrecoverable memory. While the
surfaces are richly detailed, intimate and yet extremely powerful,
one would have to X-ray them to “see” all they contain.
Holding in balance the impulses of memorialization and renovation,
they continue Sacks’s search for what is “visible” to
the human eye and mind, in both human and non-human history.
In the work made
for Piece Unique, Sacks draws on his experience of working with
Peter Brook on the design of the
play “Sizwe
Banzi est Mort”, a translation of the South African play by
Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (Fugard is from Sacks’s
birthplace, Port Elizabeth). The large cardboard, referring back
to the “Township Series” of Sacks’s prior show,
undertakes a “magical” representation of an African “City
of the Future.” In it, many emblems of colonial and multi-national
presences continue to mark a vivid schematic design made up of illusionistically
rendered flags, roadways, buildings – a backdrop for some as
yet unimagined action.
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