L’exil du cygne, 1984

A large primed canvas, placed in a corner of the room on the bases of plaster casts of two Corinthian columns, bears the pencil drawing of the coordinates that mark the corner where it is located. Scattered on the canvas and all around the wall are the torn details of the reproduction of an eighteenth-century drawing of a hand holding a pen.1 Inserted in nine of these fragments, corresponding to the area where the pen is reproduced in the drawing, is a white feather that seems to make them twirl inside and outside the space of the work.
Whereas the perspectival drawing announces the empty space of a stage – the moment that precedes a representation – the fragments of the image of the hand intent on writing or drawing allude to something unexpressed. The silence (or the void) of both situations suggests the "exile" of perceivable signs, evoked through the homophony between the French words signe” (sign) and “cygne” (swan), as well as through the twofold meaning of the feather (both the pen of the poet-artist and the attribute of the swan).
The plurality of meanings is further enriched by the reference, in the title, to the famous final line of the sonnet Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui... (1887) by Stéphane Mallarmé, in which the swan, ideal symbol of the poetic flight, recognizes its exile, that is, its condition as a castaway in a frozen lake, condemned to motionlessness and impotence, to express, in a figurative sense, the insufficiency of the language with respect to the dimension of the absolute. Whereas beyond the space of the representation the pencil drawing and the feather-pen announce an ideal vision, on this side of the threshold the perspectival solution is an optical illusion and the feather-pen does not end up tracing any drawing.
The first formulations of the theme of L’Exil du cygne date back to a work made in 1982 (GPO-0466) and to the print edition with the same title executed in early 1984 (GPE-0046). The subsequent developments include four other homonymous versions, made from 1984 to 1993 (GPO-0514, GPO-0610, GPO-0652, GPO-0712).

1 The reproduction is from Diderot's Encyclopédie, in which the drawing with nine numbers didactically illustrates the "true way to hold a pen" while writing (L’Art d’écrire, pl. III, p. 126).