1984 Exhibition

For five weeks, Bex will be hosting works by contemporary Swiss sculptors. Strange profiles populate our parks: symbols and witnesses of our troubled and paradoxical era, they blend beautifully with the natural surroundings. What could be a more beautiful setting than nature, the eternal creator, for these silent questions, these fleeting reflections of truth, immortalised in metal or stone?
Bex & Arts: an encounter between art and landscape, but also and above all between art and the people who live here in 1984.

Aimé Desarzens, Mayor of Bex

“…The fact is, for three thousand years, only corpses have been sculpted. Sometimes they are called recumbent figures and laid to rest in tombs; other times they are seated on curule chairs or perched on horses. But a dead man on a dead horse is not even half a living man. The people in museums lie, these rigid people with white eyes. These arms pretend to move, but they float, supported between top and bottom by iron rods; these frozen forms struggle to contain within themselves an infinite scattering; it is the imagination of the viewer, mystified by a crude resemblance, that lends movement, warmth and life to the eternal collapse of matter. We must therefore start from scratch. After three thousand years, the task of Giacometti and contemporary sculptors is not to enrich galleries with new works, but to prove that sculpture is possible. To prove it by sculpting, as Diogenes, by walking, proved movement. Proving it, like Diogenes, against Parmenides and Zeno. We must go to the limits and see what we can do. If the undertaking were to end badly, it would be impossible, in the best case scenario, to decide whether this signifies the failure of the sculptor or that of sculpture: others would come along, who would have to start again…”

Sartre, Situations, Il