extract

De Zan works in a rather small studio whose windows look out on the road. Maybe it’s the rainy, black-and-white day, maybe it’s the dusty look to this vaguely Fifties part of town, but it’s like venturing along the lonely streets, paved with irony, of Robert Doisneau’s photographs of Paris.

De Zan’s works are lined up waiting for me on the shelves, some stretched out and hollow like mute flutes, others broad and variable in size, all apparently precariously balanced. Going up the narrow stair to the overhead gallery I am spied on by a throng of figures – De Zan’s vases with their long or short necks, some open, some half-closed – that might be speaking in low voices or laughing at me mockingly in strident accents.

The surface, the skin of these figures is scratched by long vertical parallel lines, or furrowed by the signs of a mysterious alphabet. I become convinced – as a veiled light rains from the studio windows – that the language, the manner and the taste of De Zan belong to an Oriental world of slow pace and pause-filled reflection.

1996