Glass Spaces

Text by Stéphane Correard, Art critic and journalist.

Simon Berger is a refractory artist. He doesn’t draw with matter, but inside it. He neither adds nor subtracts. Rather, he imperceptibly transforms substance, so that the viewer can only discover his work by virtue of his true medium: light. Like Schrödinger's famous cat which - trapped in a box - is both dead and alive, Berger's works are simultaneously material and immaterial, visible and invisible. Transposing this so-called Copenhagen interpretation, it is then the gaze that, taking in the work, disturbs the object and causes it to evolve from a so-called superposed quantum state (where atoms are both intact and disintegrated, but with a probability of disintegration that is itself perfectly determined within a given time interval) towards a measured state. This second state does not pre-exist our gaze: instead, it is the light that makes it happen. Simon Berger draws inside the glass - through successive percussions of impressive mastery. Yet, it is the phenomenon of refraction that ultimately lends substance to his works. The very moment when light - projected at 300,000 kilometers per second - deviates from its rectilinear trajectory upon hitting glass and subsequently changes speed by passing from one transparent state to another. A transition whose boundary, the crack, is the artist's singular trait. 

The Large Glasses 

Following the twentieth century, how can one think of a work in cracked glass without immediately drawing a parallel with Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,1 conceived between 1915 and 1923? Eager to escape the rule of perspective that had governed Western art since the Renaissance, Duchamp pursued the idea of a transparent painting that, abolishing the traditional dichotomy between background and subject, would become a window opening onto a space as far as the eye could see. Constructed on two assembled glass panels and set in a wooden structure, the work was partially painted in oil while including lead inserts, dust, etc. - soon becoming known by the diminutive name of The Large Glass. The vitreous canvas thereby proved deeply influenced by the scientific thinking of the time, as much as by the alchemical ideal of an occult transformation of matter. “I thought of the idea of a projection," Duchamp would go on to affirm, "of an invisible fourth dimension, we can't see with our eyes...“ 

In this respect, it is fascinating that the work's completion was not only fortuitous, but also hidden. After being exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the work was crated in 1926 for delivery to the collector Katherine Dreier, where it remained for several years until the packaging was opened in 1933 and the glass panels found to be broken. Delighted, Marcel Duchamp declared that chance had completed his work and chose to keep the broken pieces. He subsequently spent three months assembling and consolidating the fragments by encasing them in thicker sheets of glass. The analogy with Schrödinger's cat is striking, as the work in the crate was at one and the same time completed, destroyed and finally completed again. 

The Traces of Chance 

The paroxysmal use of broken glass is not the only link between Berger and Duchamp. Watching Berger work - as focused on his tool as the tip of his hammer on the mineral surface of the glass - it becomes clear that every line he inscribes in the material bears a strong resemblance to Duchamp‘s Standard Stoppages2. Not by the conscious imprint of the hand. Not even by the unconscious recording of a so-called automatic Surrealist drawing. But rather by the effect of chance itself - which is why Duchamp called this work ‘canned chance‘3. “This experiment," he commented, "was carried out in 1913 to imprison and conserve forms obtained by chance, by my chance. At the same time, the unit of length, a metre, was changed from a straight line to a curved line, without effectively losing its identity as a metre, but nevertheless casting a pataphysical doubt on the concept that the straight line is the shortest path from one point to another.“  

Broken, each line drawn by Berger intrinsically incorporates its share of chance, each one uncontrolled, spreading freely through the crystalline material. The rhizome as a whole, however, draws a woman's face with breathtaking mastery. Becoming veins, the lines breathe a paradoxical and striking life into the traits, the flow of light replacing the breath of existence. Sometimes Berger draws a sphere, a lion or a skull. Yet women largely dominate his intimate cohort. As unreachable as they are desirable, they prove not unlike Duchamp's Bride, approached by the mechanism of prudence4. Theirs is a nearly real presence, despite being almost virtual. 

On the Scale of the City  

Hailing from a Street Art background, marked by his mastery of carpentry, cabinet-making and mechanics, Berger's introduction to glass - unlike Duchamp‘s - came not through the ethereal world of post-Cubist salons, but through direct confrontation with urban material. The glass Berger uses derives from the windshields of car carcasses, which were left at his hands after he had used up all the scrap metal. Emanating from a dreamlike vision, the first strokes came together, perhaps to sketch the blink of an eye or the corner of a lip. “On safety glass“, the artist comments “these motifs take on their full meaning and magically attract the viewer. It's a discovery from abstract fogging to figurative perception.“ 

A draughtsman and painter with light in the soul of glass, Berger first and foremost is a sculptor, since it is in the thickness of the silica sheet that his line nestles. Increasingly however, his practice is pushing him to explore beyond the glass pane. While his vitreous canvases can be displayed on a wall, thus mimicking a painting, he likes to see them replace the glass of a building or even a shop window, with the faces they bear becoming ghostly presences in the streets. In some series, he juxtaposes the glass walls to form a cube where the image unfolds like a slow-motion film. In others, the cubes are reduced to their faces, which, through a sophisticated play of superpositions, redirect the refracted motif on the scale of the city. 

From Point to Line 

Armed only with his hammer, one end of which is flat and square in cross-section, the other sharp as a pick, Berger pounds the surface of the glass like a virtuoso woodpecker. The sound he produces, metronomic and measured, is akin to the minimalist, repetitive compositions of Steve Reich or Philip Glass: In their hypnotic nature, they become the aortic beat of existence itself, the faces born under his expert fingers taking shape and awakening to their own life. The progression of the line in the sharpness of the material is reminiscent of a fundamental fluid, a vital sap that would come to breathe strength and energy into the features of the face that blossoms under the dry and precise impacts. If René Char's Hammer is without a master, Simon Berger's has found its own. 

Indeed, Berger's seemingly simple gesture proves to be extraordinarily fruitful - like all major artistic discoveries. It resolves the knot introduced by Kandinsky in 1926 in Point and Line to Plane5, which characterises the art of composition as the result of the dichotomy between point and line: On paper or canvas, form can only be concise - in which case it's a point - or the product of force - when the point becomes a line - because a living force has been exerted on it in a certain direction (by the artist's own hand or a substitute). 

A Human Light 

In this case, with Berger exerting the force, it is concentrated precisely on the point - the point of impact. Through its qualities of feuillature6 - the artisan's word for the multiple, infra-thin layers of glass - it is the material itself which drives the transformation of this point into a line, by virtue of the unpredictable, subdued repercussion of the explosive impact on the material. This part of Berger's art escapes him in depth, while the result expresses all his mastery, and the viewer perceives in it the spark of uncertainty that is the mark of life itself. 

For astrophysicist David Elbaz, the entire history of the universe depends on the conversion of energy into grains of light, without which no matter would exist. And every body, when hot, produces light through the creation of photons. So, if the Sun is our main source of light, it's only because of its inordinate size. Comparatively speaking, one gram of a human being produces 200,000 times more light than one gram of the Sun. In a complete reversal of the microscopic and the macroscopic, if Simon Berger‘s faces drawn by light in glass evoke constellations or, better still, milky ways, in truth it is their human part whose brilliance is experienced through the eye. 

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Stéphane Corréard is a Paris-based art critic and journalist specializing in contemporary art. He writes regularly for leading French art publications, including Beaux-Arts Magazine and Le Journal des Arts, where he contributes critical essays, reviews, and commentary on the evolving art landscape. Through his writing, he has established himself as a sharp and influential voice within the French contemporary art discourse.