Didier Semin – Locus Solus, 57. Sublimation of a sparrow's feet (excerpt, p. 80-83)

The first time I encountered Patrick Neu—if I may be permitted to indulge in reminiscence—was with Georges Didi-Huberman, in 1996. Together we were organizing an exhibition entitled L'Empreinte (1), at the Georges Pompidou Center. Patrick Neu came warmly recommended to us by Sarkis, his former professor at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg. I had seen only one or two of his works up to that time, and I did not have a clear image of them, but Sarkis's judgment was reliable, and my own curiosity was further piqued by an unexpected detail personal in nature. Neu lived and worked near Bitche, not far from the ponds of Haspelschiedt and Hasselfurth, in the border region north of Lorraine. In the world of Parisian art, this area seems nearly as exotic as the Sepik Valley or the Salomon Islands; but this is where I spent some of the happiest Sundays of my childhood. The fact that Neu did not disown this rugged land for the sake of his career as is customary, and our shared attachment to the place inspired in me a sense of kinship. I waited for him with an a priori favorable disposition at the café where we had arranged to meet. I was not disappointed. After a brief exchange of polite greetings—the man is what we call in my family a “taciturnist,” averse to needless chatter—Neu pulled two small Seita matchboxes from his pocket. The first box, lined with hydrophilic cotton, contained a silver casting of a young woman's lips, an object only a millimeter or two thick. The second housed a sort of an extraordinary Lilliputian monument: two sparrow's feet cast with astounding precision in brilliant steel, resting on a metal base the size of a thimble, and pointing towards the distant sky like the feet of dead birds by the country roadside.

One of the challenges of the project which Georges Didi-Huberman and I had undertaken was to understand, as accurately as possible, how works of art were made. Historians and critics are accustomed to plunging headlong into interpretation, to begin discoursing immediately and ad infinitum on the why of the works: their social role, their originality or their aspiration to transcendence, depending on the period and school of thought. Our supposition was that one should first inquire into the how: that the modes of operating and of fabricating art communicate an anthropological signification inaccessible to presumptuous analysis overconfident in its theoretical tools. It was quite natural then, that we questioned Patrick Neu on the process of fabrication of the two objects extracted from their matchboxes as if they were jewels. The method used to manufacture the silver lips (light as kisses blown by lovers and children who imagine that a kiss is a feather in the palm of their hand), was not particularly mysterious: the artist used the technique of cire perdue, or the lost wax process—one of the most basic methods of hollow casting—starting from an alginate mould. The sparrow's feet, however, were fabricated differently. If one wishes to obtain a metal duplicate of a perishable object, a plant or other organic matter for example, and one doesn't require the preservation of the original, one may bypass the production of a wax cast. The perishable object can be encased in refractory plaster and then calcined with molten metal which simply replaces the object in the mould. This method, which results in the loss of the cast object, allows for imprints of extreme precision, in all respects faithful to the vanished model. This process bears the unhoped-for name of sublimation. It is this very method which Neu retained for his sparrow's feet; steel, which has a higher melting temperature than either bronze or silver, was particularly well-suited for the operation.

The coincidence of practical vocabulary with the terminology used in aesthetics or in history poetically confirmed Warburg's dictum (which guided the preparation of our exhibition) that “God dwells in the detail” (“Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail” (2)), even if it is technical detail. There was something truly sublime about this steel monument for a dead bird, something that surpassed, despite its height of 1.5 cm, the emotion provoked by much more ambitious mausoleums. One could ask whether the idea of the sublimation of a dead sparrow's feet might not be a metaphor for Neu's oeuvre as a whole, with its principal characteristic of reconciling ambition and lightness, apparent insignificance and gravity, perfect modesty and absolute technical mastery. This exercise in sculptural acrobatics has few equals in the so-called scene of contemporary art (which is, in fact, all too often a “scene.”) (...)