Nathalie Quintane on César's Expansion: Compression, Style, and the Poetics of Material

In a text published in artpress 2 n°26 (August/September/October 2012), writer Nathalie Quintane reflects on the work of French sculptor César (César Baldaccini), particularly his "Expansions"—polyurethane foam sculptures that expand and harden. Quintane weaves a personal, poetic meditation connecting César's expansions to themes of compression, style (as the knot of a tie), and the materiality of art. She references Yves Klein throwing his tie over the windmill, triggering a dark period for French syntax. Quintane notes that César, who was very short (his skull reaching the elbow of Stéphane Bérard in a 1994 photo), may have compensated through expansion. She describes a rusted metal sculpture in the garden of the Fondation Cartier, calling it a "diarrhea in cast iron." Quintane cites Lawrence Alloway on Pop Art's horizontal continuum and Hal Foster on the horizontal expansion of art and cultural value (from "The Return of the Real," page 245, La lettre volée, 2005). She mentions César's 1969 orange metallic lacquered expanded polyurethane expansion, produced in the studio. The text is structured as a numbered list of 40 fragments, blending autobiography, art criticism, and linguistic play.