Louis Soutter and Victor Hugo

In his sole contribution to the journal Minotaure in 1936, Le Corbusier admitted that his cousin Louis Soutter’s visionary conception of a life—or a house—predicated on interiority was entirely opposed to his own. A more apt alliance is made in this exhibition, pairing Soutter’s works on paper with those of the author Victor Hugo. Common literary themes and a predilection for the fantastic over descriptive fidelity unite the two artists, despite their stylistic differences. Soutter’s drawings flourish across notebooks and pages; Hugo’s washes of ink seep across leaves of paper in waves.

Gothic bell towers and ruined châteaus are shrouded by Hugo’s barely controlled stains; occasionally contained by the use of stencils, they nevertheless often verge exhilaratingly on abstraction. Both artists are obsessed with crepuscular scenes rendered in chiaroscuro. Yet the Romantic writer’s liquescent atmospheres make way for something cruder in Soutter’s unrefined figures and landscapes. Formed by agitated strokes, his bodies grope amid spaces modeled in tangled hatchings, as in Bacchantes, 1923, depicting a trio much like the famed graces given over to Dionysian frenzy. The central figure interrupts the flow of language in the drawing, her foot bisecting the work’s inscribed title to translate the nudes’ activity from ancient mythology into present-day French: a vessel that haunts. Faces composed of little more than ocular cavities emerge from darkness in another work, including a pantheon of artistic and literary personae, such as Hugo, all named on the drawing. Like Hugo’s interest in the architectural monuments of earlier epochs, Soutter’s adoption of canonical literary motifs produces a space in which myth and history might disturbingly collide, even as they recede into obscurity.