TESTIMONIALS

I recognize an identical movement of love and curiosity in Colette Delozanne’s sculptural ceramics (...) Also, I recognize the revelation and the shock caused by the discrepancy between a society without values that emerge from the super-development and the ideological technology (whence comes Colette) and the re-encounter with old societies such as the pre-Colombians, based on the fundamentally sacred resources (...) Colette Delozanne’s work are a complete result of these discoveries, dispositions and purposes. Among the three groups that I would like to divide the exhibition the pieces with a tower shape, the hollow pieces, and the objects with more compact and freer forms— I think that the towers are her best achievements (...) They have an enchantment and force, simplicity of materials, and, such a prudence in their decorative invention, that it renders them just splendid.

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Marta Traba

Excerpt “Ultimas Noticias” Caracas, 12-05-1974

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Objects founders of civilization, created by Colette Delozanne, as if we were performing a propitiatory ritual that then acquires the characteristic of a creativity studio. With the corresponding materials, this artist organize the differentiated forms of culture, a product of techne, as the ancients called it, as a process of the self’s arcane life towards its knowledge culmination. In this way, her admiration leads to pre-Colombian art, made “to please the gods”. In a similar fire that was consecrated to nourish sacred ideas, the earth molded by her hands is transformed in principle, the principle in conduct, and the conduct in universal law. Thus, the art work acts again in a generic function. Seeing together, we have a complete idea of the fantastic world, by the man given voices without obtaining an answer. Saturated with France, where she was born, Colette Delozanne fully identified herself, her faculties to create and dwell in being, that which others call psyche, with her residence in Venezuela. Here she would experiment, in breathing the air and finding earth’s primordial colors, a physical necessity, imperial, unbridled, to associate herself with what now revealed itself to her as nature’s wisdom. A myth in Europe. Then, she transferred her ceramist utensils to rituals, the art of ceramics to the mystery heights. To corroborate on the wonderful-real (Alejo Carpentier was right!) the design that has been progressively perfectioned in these last few years, Colette Delozanne takes as a base, a fusion of vegetable elements, minerals, animals, enriched at the same time by the living texture that in all cases affirm the properties of the medium in a common eloquence of results. The spirit must necessarily be mixed in the operation of elevating the clay to a liturgic symbol category. Colette Delozanne does not work in the vacuum. In all cases the development of the form occurs as a ceremony that was being 30 directed to exalt a supreme power, the more it is unknown, the greater its expressive efficacy. The building of the deity before the eyes that ignore her, that loves lost her tracks in the industrial era, the inability of today’s world to effectively establish the relationship values between nature and the self.

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Rafael Pineda

Excerpt “El Universal”, Caracas, 15-12-1974

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In this sense, a prize won by Colette Delozanne, not only resulted surprising but also constituted a true revelation. Because this artist’s triumph happens to- be doubly meritorious, since the fact that she is almost unknown and of having developed her work on the borderline of exhibitions, placer her at obvious disadvantage in relation to her competitors. It was exclusively the quality and the pieces themselves sent to Valencia that made the jury decide to award her the National Prize, without taking into account any other type of consideration (such as prestige, trajectory, friendships, public relations, etc.)

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Perán Erminy

Excerpt “El Nacional”, October 1977

 

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Because your works, it is true, are material facts, sculptures that stand firm, erected, as the heavy stones places by man a long time ago to mark the route that goes from the Atlantic to Asia. Its fissures, its doors, windows and shutters, swept by the wind, penetrated by the air, confer a perfect and harmonious equilibrium of sustenance, their right to live and remain without support in the space where they are located. They are hard works, of naked and essential expression. Standing in front of them, we are suddenly moved. But when the quietude tries to open its way through the shake sensible universe, something new wounds regions not yet touched by the sensibility, forcing us to recede our steps. We become aware, all of a sudden, that the internal spaces that cross her sculptures, which are never virtual spaces, lodge in their interior, investing them with a spiritual corporality, profound forces, powerful and primary, contained forces as you yourself call them, citing Popol Vuh. We forget then that we are facing the clay of bitter texture, facing the burnt clay, sometimes coarsely finished, sometimes beaten, crushed, wounded. We find ourselves now, facing grand dwellings perforated in the living stone, populated with gusts and mysterious subterraneous currents hat detain us, and conquer us to conduce us, subjugated, to the interior of the world of primary essences.

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Inocente Palacios

From a letter to the artist 02-12-1977

 

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Colette Delozanne is one of our most original and exacting artists. Her expressive vigor is peremptorily distinguished as we relate her to other expressions, and we think that it outstands when we notice that her magical expression of constructive imagination does not limit itself exclusively to molding the appearance of a thing, an object, a plant, as a surface, limit, roundness. From the beginning her art brought with it a creative vision much more reaching in time and space then the refulgent roundness of a fruit, a-cup, or a leaf placed over the whiteness of any open notebook. Whence comes one of the first artistic conditions for her sculptural form to make statements with more suggestive possibilities than that of being only a figuration analogous to the selected and imagined concept. And whence too... And this should not be so strange. Colette Delozanne, and as a result of her material, at every instant giving the most autochthonous of its horizontal and vertical movement, grants us as the center, or principal axis of the thematic unity, that which has already disappeared, galleries, “sacred precincts”, together with what could be the shelter for the upcoming centuries, as if inside her, the most urgent would have been to indirectly agglomerate, in her matter and color, all that has ceased to exist with what probably will be, and thus communicate through the dramatic and andante sonority of her expression, that we are not only a solitary skiff unceasingly the world, that we possess a beginning with the earth and that we exist with it, together, with its air, its horizons, the cathedrals, the buildings, and rockets.

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Elizabeth Schön

Excerpt “El Nacional”, Caracas, 19-10-1981

 

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A transcendental religious feeling it the raison d'etre of Colette Delozanne’s sculptures. We must clarify, however, that this in no way a religiosity of an established cult. Rather, the artist operates supported by a mysticism of natural forms, and of the most vital and creative force of man: love. Usually composed of two or more units, an evident allusion to bonds and fusions, Delozanne’s sculptures possess an innate monumentality, even when they are created in small or medium formats. Because they are works conceived to man’s physical measure, but at the same time, made without being removed from nature, infinite in its sensitive scope over us. In this way, they invite us to move through spaces that are both human and divine, passing through one section of the works to another, inside, outside, high, low, in front, behind, in a continuum of time and space, of matter and vacuum, of movement and inertia: continuum both spiritual and corporal. The spaces, wonderfully captives, with always harmonious proportions, a subtle and earthen chromatist, and, above all, the unutterable correspondences between volume and vacuum, impel us to go through our own interior spaces, unified with nature and fortified by the beliefs in the positive, and sacred influx of art and love.

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Antonio Arraiz

Except from the catalog “Once Visiones Vitales” Galerfa El Muro, Caracas, 1986

 

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Colette Delozanne’s art piece at the entrance of the Teresa Carreño, an organic work, baroque, profuse and sensorial, is of particular interest. It is also open, but it does not open because of spoliation or because it requires emptiness, it does not open in fragmentation, in simplifying or synthetizing as with the constructive and abstract modern works. It is enticing and receptive. It opens only to attract It is not complete unless you have entered it. Its emptiness is not of rational necessity but a vital artifice to become even more vital. Its emptiness is captivating and enveloping”.

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Maria Elena Ramos

Excerpt “Papel Literario”, El Nacional, Caracas, 12-01-1986

 

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I like to imagine Colette Delozanne’s sculptures as time signs post erected in space and divested of something that once had a sacred meaning for creative, ancient and already extinct cultures. I see them, without the need to make any abstraction efforts, as monuments that remain after the sculptures that originated them have already disappeared. These vertical sculptures by their forms, textures and the spirit that they transmit, are related to the ‘dolmens, the raised stones, the covered galleries, the chamber sepulchers. The megalithic cultures menhirs before the Indo-European invasions, and present today in various continents, although there is an insistence in its intermixture of roots being only Euro-Occidental.

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Juan Liscano

Excerpt from “Papel Literario” of “El Nacional”, Caracas. 09-07-1987

 

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Her mixed intention is outlined in her daring search to penetrate in order to discover, assimilate and incorporate herself. From his convergent encounter has emerged the legitimacy of her potentiality that has enable her to recede in order to advance, remember to prefigure, to take back in order to create, to sink in her roots to separate. Colette Delozanne feels in her innermost core this complementariness and transcribes freely the designs that from it are derived. It is because of it that her sculptures are armed with the idea of complementariness and integration. The vertical elements are supported by the horizontal ones, the modules sustain themselves mutually, the parts are harmonized with the inclination to the whole, the mineral connotation is incorporated to the vegetal denotation, the archaic features are resolved with the finished order, the natural prisms interact with the elaborated resolutions. There emerges, then, a work that makes concrete the image of a yesterday that still lives through the present experience. This curious and rarefied conjugation is concretely expressed in forms that go beyond their plastic materiality to replevy the legitimacy of mystic signs, spiritual refuges, mystic figures, hybrid silhouettes, the penetrable areas and open organisms, where the atavist, the telluric and the human are factors of the same intellectual aspiration and of the same intuitive vigor.

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Victor Guedez

Unpublished text

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COLETTE DELOZANNE. BUILDINGS PLANTED

Colette Delozanne has developed sculpture since the mid-1960s. He always showed interest in working with the primordial element of the earth, not developing objects of utilitarian order, but showing to the world aesthetic objects, objects that sought visual complacency and, above all, objects of deep symbolic interiority. Since its beginnings it has resorted to symbols because they are unconsciously generated in the common collective, thus allowing its work to reach a multiple and extensive audience. Her sculptures resemble strong planted constructions, idols, altars, great dancing ladies, as the artist claims. In addition, we can appreciate them as great habitats for meditation and therefore for reflection; they are metamorphoses of living matter that breathes and drags history, that simulates poetry, that are shown to us through prophetic oculi -vision, breathing, of purification and mystery, which let us see different worlds, different beings, perhaps the original beings or the beings to come. Through the ascending tentacles, folds and folds of his sinuous creations we can feel the Universe, its warmth and its pain; suffer the agony of this absurd end of the century, enclosing the very interiority of the artist who is concerned about the continuous loss of creativity and values in the new generations. Colette Delozanne has been faithful to an artistic and experiential code that has allowed her to remain valid over the years with a work that shows the individuality of his style, present in its baroque constructions as a mixture of a cultural baggage of postwar Europe and the always baroque America. Sequence of oculi that dematerialize the mass, becoming an agent of communication; realms of time, space and existence."

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Zhelma Portillo

Exhibition catalog Hondo temblor de lo secreto, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1995.

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COLETTE DELOZANNE: THE WINGS OF MUD

 Colette Delozanne’s sculptural work rests on the clay to transcend it, to elevate it to the category of sublime material. Made by nature, kneaded by man and offered to God in the sculptures of the artist, the clay has the ability to rise, to acquire wings to carry to the heights messages of faith and love, hope and transcendence, harmony and solidarity that make effective the fundamental encounter between man and God.

Our sculptor rethinks universal themes and symbols so that her work goes beyond herself and becomes an invitation to reflection and rethinking of man and humanity. The receptacles, the porches, the niches, the caverns, the bellies, the vertices, the bloody and hidden hearts, the medieval rose, the hollows, are joined to the bonds, the encounters, the vigils, the hugs, the tremors, to secrecy, to the fervour that the sculpture of Colette Delozanne may be the spokesperson of a new time marked by reconciliation and encounters.

True synthesis of cultures and beliefs, the artist’s proposal carries implicit the history of hierogamy, of the desired contacts between man and divinity. Molded menhirs, differentiated tumuli, archaic churches, rebuilt towers, westernized mosques, novel pagodas, humble cathedrals, unpretentious basilicas, modest pyramids, timeless stupas, Colette Delozanne’s sculptures are the realization of a desire for transcendence and the expression of a need for faith.

Winged clay that ascends to the best of encounters, the one in which creation meets the Creator so that, in that desired amalgam, pursued, reiterated, a universe free of wars and injustices, of lies and falsehoods, of death and betrayal is consolidated. The sculpture of Colette Delozanne is a clear, evident, submissive and prompt response to the order issued by God: "You son of man, take an adobe and put it before you, and design the city of Jerusalem" [Ezekiel 4,1).

 

Enrique Viloria

Exhibition catalog Hondo temblor de lo secreto, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1995.

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EPANOUISSEMENT
This archaic word, the original vertex of the verb, gives us the vision of a multiple flowering hatching. Abstract force and conforming force, pure matter and visible matter, energy and form. This double step capable of uniting the verb with the form, the will with the matter created and governed by an order, has in turn a triple assumption, a hypostasis of creation. Colette Delozanne, who besides being a sculptor is a poet, knows this, so she chose the word Epanouissement to represent the union of her transcendent will with the work created through the spirit or soul of the world. The first act of creation, that is, the creative act of the world had its milestone in the hypostatic union of the verb with human nature. But here the poetic will, the creative will is revealed through the hands: it is the hands that bring about the exit from chaos, it is the hands that carry, "the spokes" of a spirit whose breath will constitute that sacred and maystatic flower of clay, with the union of the four elements water, earth, fire and air. Flower of original species, flower Unique rose of seven petals symbolizing the sequence of creation, the sacred order of its hierarchies from the very moment of the primary flowering or hatching, until reaching the "deep tremor of the secret". The earth is the body of creation, it is the matter, the mother, but where does that re-centered flowering in itself point, that throbbing of stone that arises and remains in the midst of chaos, as the sacred pillars that served to sustain the first trees? Although the act of creation is extra-temporal, the existence of the worlds unfolds in time from the first gesture to reach the closest of the beginning, and thus merge into the vanishing point that eliminates the distinction between the manifest and its origin. Our poet sculptor knows that too. She knows of the journey and the "walking fervor" that impels us to meet that revelation, that truth. In the midst of the "multiple sonority" that accompanies our temporal existence, in the midst of light, it announces to us the need to watch, to be in "vigil", not to miss the extraordinary and unique vision that entails the awareness that the infinite forms of the world are permanently entering and leaving existence. Where do they come from and where do they enter? There is the secret, the mystery of that incessant and unlimitedly encompassing space that contains us. ?

 

Edgar Vidaurre

Exhibition catalog Hondo temblor de lo secreto, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1995.

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TRAVELING GROVE

From its creative beginning, Colette Delozamne structured his work within a dynamic, existential vision of ascent to the highest. His previous sculptures grouped in habitable towers for fern, water, moss, stand full of platforms, slopes, still lairs. A solid material, rough, keeps them with the firmness of the oak, and the boldness of the brig. Each one of them gives us the sensation of bringing with it a beauty of very deep roots, lasting, in whose endearing germ, not visible, the earth, besides remaining the fundamental element of the artist, possesses the discovery of grafting itself to the passionate pulse, sculptural, of this our Colette so admirable, honest and genuine. Today, in these new sculptures, the round, the vertical, the wide spatial openings, It seems to be the phenomenological strongholds that the author uses to make manifest in each piece that desire for elevation that we imagine goes beyond what is required by the internal experience of the author. But if we observe this essential desire to ascend, we notice that the challenge to reach the highest, has its origin in the author by putting in his large sculptures the need to catch what the distances propose, even more, the requirement to approach that indecipherable that comes to us from the most remote and that attracts so much until reaching the moment of grasping its original primary center. And if we are not mistaken, it is the anxiety for the remote, one of the reasons that makes this work contain a universal and cosmic roots when verifying that in each sculpture remains vigorous and constant the same anxiety of search for the greatness of the heights.

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Elizabeth Schön

Exhibition catalog Hondo temblor de lo secreto, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1995.

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A TIME, AN SPACE OF CREATION

Colette's work is inserted in the period of abstraction artists whose creative motivations were spiritually oriented, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Brancusi, Paul Mondrian, Henry Moore, Joaquín Torres García, Gonzalo Fonseca, Etienne-Martin. Her works presented in abstract forms, fundamentally organic, in elemental geometries, in conceptual figuration, to define and express her sacred spaces, those of life and those of religion. Of these artists, especially the Latin American Joaquín Torres García with his theory of Universal Symbology, concerns Delozanne's search, the transcendentalism of cosmogonies materialized in projects and sculptures to inhabit as plenitude of space. Initiatory works with symbolic value in titles, definitions, forms and contents.

His work belongs to the family of Latin American and European artists who have approached their most primitive cultural and mythical sources. Developing a work, whose meaning is located in the lessons that history offers him, they stop to reflect with reason and heart on his symbolic identity. Among these we remember Carlos Mérida, María Luisa Pacheco, Fernando de Szyszlo in painting and the sculptors Marina Núñez del Prado, Alicia Penalba, Jorge Jiménez Deredia. The iconography of each one is revealing of recognizable universes in the history of art in the American hemisphere, implying, however, the universal as a conciliatory principle of creation. In their cases, the question about Being and Being, as well as in Colette's, is located in the metaphysical and cosmic origin that proves, in its abstract condition, the principle opposed to its possibilities of assuming figuration under the condition of express it in another iconographic direction. There is no doubt that, alongside these artists, the references to the possibilities of recognizable images in context, Delozanne applies that of an architecture concentrated in spiritual spaces. If the sculpture of Penalba or that of Núñez del Prado is solid, Colette's is spatial, full and empty simultaneously. It means that it reduces the metaphysical to the power of three-dimensionality without a speculative character.

Colette's work cannot be seen and appreciated from a peripheral perception. The contents of it play with the production of an aesthetic pleasure and also with the elevation of a mythical concept and feeling. Without there being a dispute between form and meaning, in an isomorphic order, she converts Myths and Gods extracted from the clay material of her own personal culture, into a symbolic work of revelations. As in ancient religions, she behaves like a demiurge of her own beliefs. The artistic-plastic level in which she places her spiritual concerns shows an exceptional management of her resources by using from the most imperceptibly subtle nuances to those in which the harshest realities are specified.

The meaning of Colette's sculpture must be interpreted as the essential mystery of the freedom of man and of the artist. Faced with her past and present reality, she assumes, as a foundation and tool, letting go and propping up her sensitivity. Since the middle of the 20th century, she has been molding clay to give a new shape and another time to cosmogonies that have encouraged man. From the one who started civilization when his arm and hand were discovered as conductors of the sacred fire of the gods who watched over his life. The artist expresses in her work throughout her entire trajectory, the sacred, spirituality, the search for the center, love for nature, the interrelationships of all natural phenomena, that is her “Credo”.

 

Bélgica Rodriguez

Colette Delozanne: Escultora, Armitano Editores, 2004