| You might be surprised to find French artist Dominique Labauvie exhibiting in Tampa. After all, the Strasbourg native has been firmly established—with many solo and group shows and public commissions—for nearly 30 years in his home country and throughout Europe, where he is known for metal sculptures, prints and drawings of his graceful, abstract figures. But Tampa, too, is home for Labauvie—and for Bleu Acier, a print atelier and contemporary art gallery run by his wife, master printmaker Erika Greenberg-Schneider. |  |
Dominique Labauvie: The Ides of March – Megan Voeller
You might be surprised to find French artist Dominique Labauvie exhibiting in Tampa. After all, the Strasbourg native has been firmly established—with many solo and group shows and public commissions—for nearly 30 years in his home country and throughout Europe, where he is known for metal sculptures, prints and drawings of his graceful, abstract figures.
But Tampa, too, is home for Labauvie—and for Bleu Acier, a print atelier and contemporary art gallery run by his wife, master printmaker Erika Greenberg-Schneider. Schneider, a New Yorker who studied printmaking in France for 20 years, printed at the University of South Florida’s Graphicstudio before opening her own studio in 2002. Fine art prints are Bleu Acier’s day-to-day business, but gallery exhibits showcasing mid-career European artists including Labauvie, Hervé DiRosa and Pierre Mabille, as well as emerging artists from around the US and Europe, are also a passion.
As you might divine from the gallery name, one of Labauvie’s mediums is steel, or “acier” in French. (“Bleu acier” refers to the moment when heated steel becomes blue—and malleable.) His forge occupies about a quarter of Bleu Acier’s 4,000-square-foot space, housed in four former storefronts in a neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification just north of downtown Tampa. His newest pieces are torch-cut from steel sheets, shaped and textured on the forge, then finished with patinas of white, rust, and deep, matte black.
That solid steel and heat seem improbable media for the creation of bodies that dance, glide, fly and wriggle joyfully gives a clue to Labauvie’s transformative skills. The figures—many rendered as ghostly silhouettes by the black patina, and others as solidly organic by a rusty hue—seem, though static and rigid, to flow in slow motion, almost as if underwater. Nearly identical and often grouped in multiples, they read as essential selves engaged in a constant exploration of their relationship to each other, recalling Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of self-consciousness inextricably linked to perception of the Other.
In several pieces, Waves I and II and The Knights, Labauvie groups figures around a table or reflecting pool, an arrangement ripe with suggestions ranging from the Last Supper to Narcissus and the pond to a cyclical vision of life. With some of the figures bent out from the main (vertical) plane at an oblique angle, the piece gains a further sense of moving through space as well as the metaphysical suggestion of multiple planes of consciousness. In Gesellen, two headless silhouettes cast shadows of negative space edged in steel; the profile of a face appears in one shadow, suggesting a spirit trailing or tracking the figure through the night.
A touch of whimsy imbues some of the more fanciful constructions. In Respire la Terre, three figures in synchronous flight glide above the earth, balanced on solid exhalations that extend like an extra limb from their mouths. The “pièce de résistance” is Brainpower, a life-sized figure carefully balanced on its head and two limbs that project, surreally, from the figure’s eyes. This piece, even more than the others, showcases the play between literal and metaphorical that makes contemplating Labauvie’s propositions so rewarding.
A series of drawings and prints accompany the sculptures. In thick charcoal and white pigment, the drawings share the subtly variegated surface texture of the metalwork while rendering a uniquely two-dimensional vision of abstracted figures. Prints, a layered combination of monoprint and woodcut, glow with vibrant color—reds and blues—and highlight the plywood grain of the wood carved with Labauvie’s gestures, a fitting expression of his ability to coax beauty from the rawest of stuff.
