Masque d'interprétation (2021) Sculpture by Xavier Malbreil

INTERPRETATION MASK

Material: Aubert Grand Antique marble


This marble, I call it "Mask of interpretation". It is combed over the face, and it translates into any language what you say, just as it translates what you are told. So why Interpretation Mask and not Translation Mask? We speak of an interpreter when it comes to translating live, orally. IT vendors talk about machine translation, and would have people believe that an algorithm could translate one language into another without human intervention. So, yes, interpretation rather than translation, because finely rendering in another language a somewhat complex content is a matter of interpretation.
When I took it into my head to transform a block of marble that was lying around in my studio into a mask, fear took hold of me. The mask, one of the most traditional themes, the most complex, as it leads to anthropology, to the performing arts, to the questioning of representation... what was I going to do in this galley? And yet, it wasn't a mask either that I wanted to make, but rather a neutral over-face that would express the complexity of human communication, the almost impossibility of translating from one language into another. The language which binds men of the same culture, but which also unbinds them, the often treacherous language, which says the opposite of what we intended to mean.
Little by little, during this project which took place over months, years, it was this word which imposed itself, LIES, and this play on the accent present, or absent, LIÉS or LIES. Linked, letters are linked together to form words, words are linked together to create sentences, languages are linked together by translation, by equivalences, approximately, approximations. And if we consider that the white vein on the E is not equivalent to an accent, we link the word "LIES", plural of LIE, which is used in the singular above all, "to drink the chalice until the dregs, the dregs of humanity", of course, but above all, in English, lies, or here lies, which can be read on the tombstones "here lies Mary Schelley". On these four letters, therefore, a concentration of contradictions, all the more so if one ventures into the etymologies, for some uncertain, where one learns that "lies", lie has the same origin as "lies" be extended. And that perhaps even the word "lie", that of the chalice, would have an English etymology, lees, of unknown origin.
But it is above all the French-English couple "liés-lies" that I wanted to hear, that I wanted to read. The link, the lie.
This full mask is not pierced, as Philippe Baudelot points out. It is a choice that I matured for a long time. To pierce it, to let the sight and the voice pass, was of course to bring it towards the theatrical mask, the mask, to speak more broadly, of representation, which one puts on to incarnate a divinity, an animal, a concept, a character. My mask does not go in that direction; he expresses something through the written language. For those who see it, it poses a question of interpretation, depending on whether one reads bound or lies, which passes through reading, through the written sign, in Latin characters. In this way, he clings to my work for more than 20 years, and the "10 poems in 4 dimensions" in particular, which makes me question the fate of written languages in a digital civilization that undermines them, in a certain way, by bypassing the straightjacket put in place by the printing press for more than five centuries. The writing came out of the books, but to tell the truth it had never been padlocked in the books, it was always everywhere, we simply wanted to ignore it. This liberation, we are now unfortunately seeing the repercussions, when false information, rumor, denigration, circulate faster than the bad winds.
This mask is to be read, but it is not only to be read. He is to be watched too, unless it is he who is watching us, and that is the whole ambiguity of this work. By working on the layout of the letters, helped in this by a visual artist friend, I suggest an equivalence between the letters and the four points around which we recognize what a face is, the eyes, the nose, the mouth. But I make it clear that this is a particular reading, because one could very well refuse it, and see only a mute form, which, it is an experience to be made in the presence of marble, will greatly change its expression depending on the angle where you stand, depending on the light. If you look at it sideways, shadows stretched out, and it will look grim, hopeless. From the front, it will be more neutral, even haughty, pleasant. From a low angle, he will be angry, etc...and sometimes he will give the impression of being resonant, of talking. Do we want to give a meaning to the qualities of the marble and we will see in the white veins for this one wrinkles, for that one flashes, for another the contrast between a more monochrome side and another more striped, highly symbolic, when it is a question of signifying the chasm between the link, the inclusion and the lie.
A mask to read and see, therefore, which sends us back to a question that we often ask ourselves concerning the universality of cultural forms: is every work acceptable to every representative of the human species, whatever their level of culture and language learning? For a speaker who does not have the Latin alphabet as a horizon, what will this mask say? The Latin characters, while their arbitrary character, liberating imitation, lends itself very well to these games of equivalence with the image. I wonder, thinking of a Mayan, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Arab, or alien, or distant humanity spectator who has erased everything and started all over again, looking at this mask and recognizing only a face in it. What are these round signs on its surface? Do they want to say something?
In a word, do writing, reading, and the intention that I place there, exhaust the form of this mask? If non-Latin speakers wonder about these strange signs on the surface of this marble, after all, won't they make an interpretation? Today, as in thousands of years, it is the privilege of marble, they will seek meaning in these signs for a time, or forever, impenetrable.
So much for this "Mask of interpretation".
Thank you to everyone who has helped me, at one time or another, for the realization of this mask.

Height: 33cm
Width: 29cm
Thickness: 12cm
Weight: 15 Kilograms
Material: Aubert Grand Antique marble

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