gawain

Hello everyone,

I'm helping a friend with the translation of a text about an artist, Jephan de Villiers. I tried to stay very close to the French, but some of the parts of the text are very difficult to understand, very poetic and quite abstract. I'd like someone to proofread the translation and tell me if there are grammatical mistakes or if some sentences don't make any sense at all.

I'd be glad to help anyone with their French in return.

Thanks for your help.

Here is the text :

The first time you hear the name of an imaginary word being uttered is not something without any importance.

Arbonia, this world of the tree created by Jephan de Villiers almost 30 years ago, seizes us as soon as it is being uttered.

It reveals itself to exploration, to deciphering, it opens up a mysterious, enigmatic and generous geography, in which dreams notches themselves deeply in the meeting between the earth and nature.

This name, Arbonia, with its mere power of creation, brings us to a different world, a universe nurtured on poetry, fantasy and childhood.

The encounter with Jepahn de Villiers’ works confirms this sensation. When confronted with this vegetal and animist cosmos you cannot help feeling these same mixed emotions of great interest and fear, of promise of joy and gloomy anxiety, as when confronted with poetry.

Solitary stroller in search of what the earth willed to leave in its wake, Jephan de Villiers is in touch with the forest and nature. He gathers leaves, wood, feathers, mushrooms, carapaces, barks, that he passes by during his long walks in the forest of Soignes or the Gironde estuary, gathering them patiently and waiting for a meeting with their essence.

In the silence of his workshop, Jephan de Villiers watches, waiting for the materials to get together and to combine themselves together; waiting for the face of a laid bare world to appear in front of him. The sculptures are not premeditated; they spring up from an inward necessity. You just have to listen to the wise man, to read him, to have a stroll with him, to hear what has never stopped being his claim: his work is rather a donation than a creation. He relieves the enclosed beauty of nature, this wild beauty that surrounds us and that we have to preserve and cultivate because it is so precious and rare. It takes a lot of strength to thus give shape and life to an impression.

When looking closer to Jephan de Villiers’ sculptures you can distinguish at first sight the natural materials he gathered. But that is not the more important thing. If you move away from the sculpture you will only see some small groups, some gatherings, some communities of animated beings with incredulous and surprised expressions, wide-eyed, in a state of comical uncertainty or of fragile anxiety. Flesh beings with so deeply human physiognomies and attitudes that they strike right at our hearts.
This proximity with matter and this displacement of the senses create an aesthetic quality. The visible humility and simplicity of the presentation disappears to the benefit of a poetics full of sensations and of singular beauties. With some not-much and some known, the artist breathes something legendary, mythical, fabulous, chimerical and extraordinary into his work.

In the past, the wonder was what transgressed the distinction between the kingdoms, what mixed the animal and the vegetable kingdoms, the animal and human kingdoms. Jephan de Villiers does the same when he changes the quality of the things God or Man assigned a certain name to: he metamorphoses them; he shifts them from one kingdom to another. We are getting into what Barthes calls “the obtuse”, the turmoils of the affect, the world of the invisible and indescribable, where dreams get all their strength and can be shared by everyone.

Jephan de Villiers’ art invites to a dialogue which comes from the sphere of silence. His creations do not talk to us. They need to be listened to. They offer us a vertigo of substance. Those nomads of the past, those moving forests, those angels riding giant bears… They are messenger, but also watchers. Only armed with their fragments of memory, pilgrim’s staff and other memories from the boundaries of the world, they watch straight at our hearts and overwhelm us with the silence and the insistence of their presence.

Jephan de Villiers’ writings are silent, too. They come within the same mystery and the same empathy towards the world. ‘His writing draws from what gives birth to them: it is a resurgence of a subterranean language, long-time disappeared into the depths of the earth, the expression of a song of the world which has nothing comparable with the speech of men.’ Whether they look like elaborate calligraphy (on specific notebooks) or they cover his sculptures, his writings flood Jephan de Villiers’ work. They are the obverse of the medal of which the back is the imagination of Arbonia.
While travelling to Arbonia, a poetic of elements seeking senses stands out, accredits imagination and reconcile affections. Jephan de Villiers’ works carry a taste for the wild and the sublime: they invite us to flee from our own time and space and to walk through the remains of an ancient pantheism respectful towards saving forests and tales from the earth. Do you know any being that only lives for others, that dedicates the slightest breath, the least wing flapping, the tiniest part of their existence to a unique and sacred vocation to protect life, nature and the future well-being of the community? Now, it is the spectator’s duty to sink in deep thought, to set his imagination and his on dreams in motion.