Anthony Caro's 'sculpitecture

About a suggestion for a weekend in the North of France to discover Anthony Caro's "Le Chœur" in the church of Bourbourg.

There was a time when art was religious. There was a time when, in order to work, painters and sculptors had to respond to commissions from the great dignitaries of the clergy, and thus adorn places of worship with sacred art. The money was there. Thus churches often became veritable galleries of ancient art. But it is contemporary art that sometimes floods them today, and not only through their stained glass windows. In a small medieval town of 7,000 inhabitants called Bourbourg, in the North of France, it was on the initiative of the Ministry of Culture and the municipality, allied with the diocese, that the contemporary artist Anthony Caro (1924-2013) gave new life to the choir of the Catholic church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The church tower was completely destroyed by fire in 1940: while the Allies were trying to leave the nearby Dunkirk pocket, a German plane was hit and its flaming fuel set fire to the roof of the church, devastating the choir frame.

Although work was carried out in 1950 to restore the building, the choir was closed off for a long time by a brick wall, before British sculptor Anthony Caro was invited in 2000 to take up the challenge of restoring its light. The former Royal Navy officer who had seen London in flames could not but be moved by the project. In this splendid space, he proposed to create a kind of sanctuary, where everyone could remember the horrors of war and gather to honour the memory of the dead. "Never again".

The diocese even entrusted him with the task of designing the new liturgical furnishings: altar, candelabras, pews, etc.

It took ten years for nine sculptures in terracotta and steel sheets to be installed around the splendid white concrete baptismal fonts, which have a double helix and allow baptism by immersion. These high reliefs evoke the creation of life while recalling the town's close link with water: the name Bourbourg derives from the Flemish word "broec borg", town of the marshes.

The Bourbourg "Choir" is now part of the singular tourism linked to the episodes of the war in Dunkirk, as much as a contemporary art trail. And it can be visited with the same respect for memory as the 1940 museum near the Laac, Place of Art and Contemporary Action. Two wooden towers nestled between the arcades, which are part pulpit and part medieval military architecture, allow one to admire the ensemble from a height: this is a clear indication of Caro's interest in "sculpitecture", i.e. "sculpture as a place", since the 1980s.

According to Richard Leydier, who with this masterpiece inaugurates the new section of the contemporary artists' magazine Art Press inviting visitors to unusual and little-known places invested by contemporary art, "Caro's sculptures seem to pour streams of metal into the choir, the heavy sheets of steel seem to be subjected to a telluric dynamism that kneads them in several directions. In short, a weekend in the North is a must.