Damien Aspe

All that we have left of the symbolic activities of our most distant ancestors on this planet seems to involve tracing on supple surfaces or etching on harder ones. Engraving, inscribing, writing, drawing on labile or resistant matter. As for what those marks may have meant, the contemporary expert is necessarily reduced to unverifiable hypotheses. Yet the oldest known tracings, however clumsy and uncertain they may seem, cannot fail to evoke intention – the urge to do that rather than nothing, or rather than do something by accident or at random. And whatever intention was thus materialized, we cannot avoid considering ourselves to be its recipients, men and women who cannot help assuming it has meaning and is, therefore, a destination of the path we find ourselves on. We are the legatees of these proto, crypto or pseudo-signs. It falls to us today to see the expression of a "was" resonating through the millennia. Is that not overwhelming enough?

Damien Aspe has developed a practice of installations featuring, alongside a plaster wall, an engraving machine that reproduces, to the scale of the wall, the engraving found on a mussel shell in Java, reputed to date back 500.000 years. The odd, irregular zig-zag that it gouges out of the white surface might seem to us to be a lyrical feat reminiscent of abstract expressionism or, more simply, enraged graffiti and its ablation from the wall. That relatively sophisticated machinery is at work here leads us to think that these lines don’t spring out of nowhere. They are indeed the reproduction of an action that one might call antediluvian, in biblical terms. So it seems that the distant ancestor, the homo erectus who one day grasped the mussel shell to engrave this line that brings to mind a seismographical measure gone wild, might be saluting us in silence through this technico-digital device that transposes into the artistic arena the image in that mute message.

This work by Damien Aspe not only produces, therefore, a wall drawing in negative, but also invites us thereby to walk in the footsteps of the "first humans," to reproduce the enigmatic squiggle by which we have come to remember them as accomplished humans, by dint of a symbolic existence that spared them radical disappearance. What we now call art relies on that initial experience and on what it says about who we are: beings whose mere biological life-span is no limit.