His Own Rules

One of the tantalizing aspects of the sculpture show that filled the entire Galerie Breteau in Paris last week was that it consisted of only two works. But the two huge sculptures were enough to make bearded little Etienne-Martin, 47, the talk of the Paris galleries. L'Express saw a " 'new wave' of sculpture" and hailed him as "one of the principal inspirers." And the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune said, in critic talk: "His sculpture has the mysterious poetry and ferocity of nature and man at their most elemental." The critics received him so familiarly, in fact, that it came as a shock to realize that after all the years that Etienne-Martin has been around, this was his first one-man show.

Martin has always been the most self-deprecating of men. Born in Loriol, 67 miles from Lyons, he "got interested in art because I was no good at anything else and my family preferred art to nothing." He studied at Lyons' Beaux Arts and went on to Paris, where year after year his art became less and less beau.

He did a Knot that was just what its title suggests, and a Landscape of plaster studded with bits of metal allowed to rust under the studio's leaky roof. Some sculptures, called Enigmas are convoluted, twisting shapes that Martin admits "are a question mark to me." Another series, Couples, is "the enigma of enigmas." Heads merge into double features, hips melt into each other. This, says Martin, "is the eternal problem of the couple. Everything is couple--the thing and me."

In the current show, Martin has two Dwellings, which are made of white plaster smeared over armatures of iron. One is a rough, totemlike affair with tongues sticking out of round windows. The other is an intricate structure of surprise ledges, dangling icicles and yawning caverns. "This is an age," says Martin, "in which the individual artist--an anarchist--fixes his own rules. Today one must be sorcerer as well as sculptor."

What Martin has actually done is to become one more proponent of the fantasy art of childhood, for his nightmarish but strangely fascinating dwellings were inspired by his own boyhood home with all its sheltering cosiness and frightening mysteries. "You can penetrate into the heart of the work, which seems important to me. It's like the pleasure of walking in a park." And what does one find after penetrating into a Dwelling? "Why, oneself, of course," says Etienne-Martin.

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