Louis-Rene des Forets

The work of Louis-Rene des Forets, exemplary in its global austerity, its obsessive but lucid preoccupations, its aesthetically attuned yet unpretentious manner, had received only intermittent, if at times privileged attention until Yves Bonnefoy's subtle and penetrating analyses appeared recently in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. Des Forets' poetics emerges today as at once existentially and aesthetically challenging, contestatory, bleak some would argue, and yet recuperative, resilient, intuitively alert to states of being our century, and even his own work, can find difficult to embrace. The tensions of role playing and authenticity are ever manifest, and simple, transitive depiction vies thus with the intransitivity of fiction. Identity easily dislodges itself and the meaning of our doing is thrown into doubt and disarray. Beyond, but also through such dramas - of man and writer - Des Forets struggles, however, to stabilise the claims of the kingdoms of love, of other, of otherness; the excarnate tussles with the incarnate; futility stares in amazement upon simplicity, childhood, mystery... John Naughton's study, eloquent, patient, discreet yet deftly perceptive, helps further to restore to Louis-Rene des Forets' work a place of honour from which it has, delightfully, honestly, tended to shrink.