Visiting with Shelomo Selinger

Shelomo Selinger has an atelier near La Motte-Picquet in the 15th arrondissement, in a the back of a quiet courtyard away from the buzz of the rue de Commerce.

Ever since he came to Paris in the 1960s, he's been sculpting the hardest stone, granit, and the hardest woods, acacia, oak, into graceful shapes whose spirit is opened by Shelomo's hard working hands, a chisel and a mallet.

He's also been filling a room with exquisite bronze sculptures, some of which can be seen, together with his other works, at the galerie Bernheim-Jeune  on rue faubourg Saint-Honoré in the VIII arrondissement. His latest man-sized sculpture is called Memoire de la shoah and greets us when entering his atelier bathed in afternoon light. Behind, surrounded by a group of his finished sculptures, is a rectangular block of granit whose spirit is waiting to be discovered and unveiled by Shelomo's hands.

Still further behind, protected by a roof, is a Japanese hard wood sculpture that still hasn't found its name yet, Shelomo is waiting to finish it to discover its identity. In a barn back of another green quiet courtyard nearby he stores the sculptures that span his time in Paris; some of them date to the 1960s, like l'accordeoniste, in granit, and a couple embracing each other in horizontal position. From his earlier work until today, his biblical and mythological symbolism has evolved into a fractured treatment of light and shadow that creates tension and is deeply rooted in his quest of memory.

As though carving the hardest stone helps him to recover from amnesia and be able to remember the past, his childhood and what is left of the past. Since 1962 Shelomo has been working with Michel Dauberville of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which lead to rich encounters with other artists exhibiting there. We sit down in a café to talk of his late friend Hervé Masson  whose brothers Loyc and André were both publisher and novelist. Hervé Masson is now due to have a major retrospective.

Born in 1919 on the island of Mauritius, then a colony of France, Masson had been one of the few painters under contract with Bernheim-Jeune since Michel Dauberville had taken over after WWII. In the 1960s Paris still had a very lively artistic community and artists shared their views over drinks - and parties were incredible.

Some of that ebullience is now gone, regrets Shelomo. In those days they all had long luncheon parties in his atelier, nobody had money, yet meeting each other was easier than today even though no one had a telephone! You just came by with a bottle of wine and sat down for a long discussion on art over grilled sardines. Masson eventually returned to Mauritius on the eve of its independence.

His political engagement, his writings, landed him in jail. It seems only now that someone remembers this great painter who was in post WWII one of the greatest in France. What got him into trouble, says Shelomon, is that he returned home and lost the means to produce art. Shelomo, on the contrary, will never stop sculpting, and his sculptures are there to survive us for centuries.

One should never forget the Shoah; and for the memory of humanity he made a memorial at Drancy  (where the French had set up a transition camp), a monument that will last for as long as the granit will hold out on our planet. The spirit is material. When will you retire? asks the waitress. Jamais, insists Shelomo; what would he do if he stopped? There're still more granit blocks waiting to be delivered of their spirit...in quest of memory.