La Cloche Des Nuages

The voice of the bells follows and outlines the movement of clouds;
over and over it dies and is reborn…

-  Rodin, The Cathedral is Dying

The hollow of a bell is dark and still in anticipation of movement. When rung, this incarnation of natural forces—fire, earth, energy—becomes supernatural, producing sound that consecrates space and calls the devoted to mark death, birth, and rites of passage. At the 11th-century monastery of Fontevraud Abbey, six bells once gave voice to its community and church. Its steeple has been silent for over two centuries, however, and high in its rafters, the wood beams hold nothing. The last Abbess shuttered the doors of the cathedral in 1792 as she fled Revolutionary forces, who melted the bells into canons. But Fontevraud is now regaining her voice.  

Fueled by a history of spirit, art, and music, Fontevraud Abbey is today a secular center for culture. In 2019, Artistic Director Emmanuel Morin inaugurated a five-year project to commission a series of six new bells, each to be designed by a contemporary artist and cast at Cornille-Havard, a 19th-century foundry. Morin chose multidisciplinary studio Barreau et Charbonnet to create the first bell, Aliénor, named for Eleanor of Aquitaine, great patron and resident of the Abbey.

Visual artist François Réau created Richard, the second bell in the series. Based in Paris, Réau’s works on paper and installations are sublime explorations of time, space, and nature in both terrestrial and celestial realms. He conjures his immense cloud drawings through thousands upon thousands of meticulously inscribed graphite marks, which amass into monumental skyscapes stretching 20 feet in length. Previously, as an artist-in-residence at Fontevraud, Réau created Mirabilia, a response to the genius loci of the monastic site. He filled the choir of Grand Moûtier with a swath of dried vines, a vast graphite drawing of cumulous clouds, and a star chart of the 12th-century sky.

The bell provided Réau with a new field upon which to inscribe history, and he chose a moment that is deeply symbolic for Fontevraud: the day of death of Richard the Lionheart, son of Eleanor of Aquitaine. As he shares in the interview below, “the sky darkened” at that moment in 1199, and through extraordinary technical mastery, Réau evokes the weight of foreboding in clouds that appear mutable and etheric despite being rendered in bronze.

Now, when rung, Richard tolls the color of those impending grey clouds, its deep, sombre sound originating in the elemental but becoming immaterial. The stroke of the bell awaits the stroke of the hand to become eternal. 

AC: Did you know what the voice of the bell would sound like before you began? It was yet to be cast.

FR: No. When the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud asked me to create the design of Richard, I didn’t know what the bell would sound like. I was told that it was a “Do,” a C. But all this is ultimately abstract because the bell did not yet exist and the sound depends on many technical criteria.  It was also difficult for me to be able to transpose the musicality of an almost 1.5 ton bell to another musical instrument to get an idea of ​​the sound.

AC: How did you decide what to depict, what to illustrate, on the bell?

FR: Even though I didn't know what that tone would sound like when I started working, I was able to imagine a lot about it before and during the casting and when I worked on the molding. A bell is a musical instrument but it is also a symbolic object.

The idea of my project was to represent the history of Richard the Lionheart in a sort of memento mori; in particular the tragic moment which cost him his life. The clouds evoke the sublime and the fragile beauty of the universe: the sky darkened on March 23, 1199, when Richard attacked the castle of Châlus. On March 26 he was hit by a crossbow bolt, and he died on April 6.

AC: There is such a poetic analogy of ethereality between clouds and sound... and of dissipation. You deepened this connection by inscribing a moment of death, a moment when one dissolves into something eternal.

FR: Yes. In addition to this engraving of clouds there is a ring of triangular shapes on the lower part of the bell—a direct reference of the crossbow bolt which was fatal to Richard. And this triangular ring is placed at the bottom, just below the landscape, like an horizon line. To me it's synonymous with line of life and line of death. Richard Coeur de Lion was on the edge, his destiny was on the wire. We talk about line of life and line of death, like the line on the…

 AC: The palm of the hand…

FR: Exactly. We have the line—the line of chance, line of death, line of life, and something of that idea is synthesized in this ring.

AC: That's such a beautiful symbol because obviously you're doing all of this work with your hands. You’re drawing the lines—they’re an extension of you. What was it like to draw on the curvature of the bell? Had you worked on a surface like that before?

FR: No, no, it's the first time—a big challenge. But what was important for me in this project was to be able to continue to draw and not to change my tools or my work processes. I used a pencil, but without graphite lead to engrave the wax mold.

AC: What did it feel like to work at Fonderie Cornille-Havard?

FR: The foundry is very fantastic — it is in Normandy near the English Channel. I worked there for several weeks and it was fantastic for me, a very beautiful light, quiet, and in a building from the 19th century where craftsmen and artists worked before me. For example, eight bells to celebrate the 850th anniversary of Notre Dame de Paris were designed and manufactured in this foundry.  It is still a somewhat timeless place, quite exceptional with very precious knowledge and expertise.

AC: Would you share a bit about the moment when the bell was born—seeing the mold lifted off, brushing away the ash, and seeing your engraving revealed?

FR: The release is an extremely moving moment because we discover the raw foundry bell. Even if there are still many stages of work afterwards such as airbrushing, chiseling, tuning, and especially the patina work, this stage is very symbolic because we discover the result after months of work.  

AC: What did it feel like to give your drawing the dimension of sound for the first time?

FR: In my work as an artist I have tried to push the limit of drawing. In this specific case, it's as if space and time were united in the same symbolic object with several senses in play, such as the view, the touch, and hearing of course. So it's the first time I can succeed in summoning several senses in the same artwork.

AC: A bell in the context of a cathedral is both a sacred and an aesthetic object, and though Fontevraud is now a secular site, did your consciousness of its history as a monastery and as a spiritual place impact your thinking around the piece?

FR: When you are at the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, you feel this very strongly, you know, this place, and everything speaks to us of time and spirituality. The choir of the abbey church itself is probably the clearest visual translation of the progression of time—the tomb of Robert d'Arbrissel [ed note: the founder of the Fontevraud order] is below the choir, so one treads this history and this time. And the semi-circular shape of the choir, with its dozen columns like a clock with hands, also reminds us of time that flows and shatters like the passing seconds, minutes or hours. In walking it, we realize this unconsciously.

For Richard, it seemed important to me for the viewer to have an experience that could exceed him physically. We can walk around this piece, and by making the drawing large enough—a 360-degree landscape—in a way the bell partly transforms from an object to a field of vision.

There was also this idea that this work could be first of all the mystery, the questioning of the power of a presence. From the moment I made this device, this vector of sensation, it is no longer its presence that counts, but rather its ability to dialogue with viewers, with a place or an architecture. Basically, substituting a dialogue for a monologue.

AC: Ultimately, the bell will be hung in le grand clocher at the Abbey. What does it feel like to be now forever inscribed in this ancient, this historic, sacred place?

FR: It's very beautiful to be able to write a page of Fontevraud. And I hope I can offer a visual and sensory experience that crosses time in a certain way. Jean-Marc Dimanche, a critic and a curator, wrote a book for Fontevraud about this experience, and he speaks of breath, or the divine air current—that the cloud is an inconsistent structure in a permanent state of formation and deformation. The cloud is indeed a symbol of what escapes representation—of what is from beyond—as well as an explicit image of transformation.

AC: Yes, and that experience is something that enables people to feel outside of time, and reconnected to what's eternal.

FR: Yes, exactly. The breath, the death of Richard, the cloud—When Richard died, he took his last breath. There is something universal and which allows everyone to reconnect with what is eternal and essential.

AC: Yes. And perhaps not only that, but that a sound wave is a phenomenon in the atmosphere, it travels like a breath or a cloud.

FR: You’re right, and in Fontevraud we feel that—all is quiet, it’s very spiritual. I want to see that in these pictures, in the landscapes, in these sensations, and in the clouds.

The design is also a link between earth and the sky: the bell is not on the land, and she’s not in the sky. She's floating in space. So I have this feeling that the bell can catch these two elements. The clouds on the bell also invite a more serene contemplation, a creative dreaming of new images—a rebirth.

A monograph on Réau's work and residency at Fontevraud Abbey, 339 Days in Fontevraud, will be published in spring 2022. His upcoming exhibitions include a collective show at H2M (Bourg-en-Bresse, France) opening in May; and solo shows for the National Monuments Center (La Rochelle, France) opening in July and the 2022 Lyon Biennial at Bullukian Foundation (Lyon, France) opening in September.

View the film by Tomasz Namerla on the creation of Richard.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.