LA VOIX – Synthétique PHILIPPE HIQUILY

WORK

The video synthesizers are instruments of productions of electronic visual imagings, which have been invented in the 1960’s and developed in the 1970’s. These video synthesizers are characterised by the capacity to generate, in an independent way, forms from electronic components. Among the famous synthesizers, Eric Siegel conceived in United States, the PCS (Processing Chrominance Synthesizer) in 1968 which ‘colors’ images from a black and white signal, and in 1970 the EVS (Electronic Video Synthesizer), which, not only colors, but also generates abstract forms. But it is mostly the artist Nam June Paik, as a resident of the WGHB of Boston, who in the 1969-1970 developed an artistic reflection on the digital image, by imagining, in collaboration with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe, a synthesizer able to create its own images.

It is in the lineage of these experiences that Philippe Hiquily is associating with Marcel Dupouy between 1973 and 1974, to integrate his Movicolor, created between 1971 and 1972, in a prospect of plastic research. Together, they realize different series of synthetic images, constituted from a video treatment of the artist’s sculpture « La Voix ». On the basis of a scalable recreation and colourisation of the form of the sculpture through variations of video electronic oscillations. In the wake of this experiment, he tried to transpose these images on more standard supports in plastic arts. In order to print one of this images on a canvas, Hiquily had to go as far as Japan, which was the only country to own the necessary technology for the print. Because of these complications, only one canvas has been printed and, besides an exhibition at the Salon de Mai in 1977, this series remains unpublished.

ARTIST

Philippe Hiquily, born March 27, 1925 in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, died March 27, 2013 in Villejuif, was a French sculptor and designer. At 18 years old, Philippe Hiquily enlisted in the army to break with his family and took part in the campaigns in France and Indochina (1945). He has been a metal sculptor since the early 1950s (iron, sheet metal, brass, aluminum).

At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1948 to 1953, he frequented the workshops of sculptors Jean Tinguely and Germaine Richier, for whom he made sculpture pedestals. He exhibited for the first time in 1955 at the Palmes gallery in Paris, then at the Contemporaries gallery in New York in 1959, where he met the great names of American art (Léo Castelli, Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Isamu Noguchi…). Success was not long in coming: the prestigious New York museums (MOMA and Guggenheim) bought several of his works. However, he will experience a crossing of the desert from 1965 to 1980, without however stopping to create.

His studio was for a long time located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, rue Raymond Losserand, at 32, now converted into an apartment. A copy of La Marathonienne is on display in the courtyard to remind us that this is where Hiquily's genius flourished. He exhibited regularly at the Salon de Mai and Jeune sculpture in Paris. From 1960, he created furniture, furniture with a dreamlike and surreal spirit. The creation of bronzes began around 1980.

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