Publications, Reviews, Magazines...   :   SENS PLASTIQUE (1959-1961)

The review Sens plastique (Paris, 1959-1961) is a poetry and art review born from the initiative of Jean-Jacques Lévêque, who was then beginning his career as an art critic: he saw the review as a more personal space for expression, run by a “group of friends”.
Sens plastique is linked to the Le Soleil dans la tête bookstore-gallery, managed by Lévêque's mother, Marguerite Fos. However, the review is not a simple gallery bulletin: it certainly promotes the gallery's artists, but it also defends other artists, while remaining faithful to a consistent aesthetic line.
Sens plastique relies on an original system of gift and counter-gift: Lévêque commissioned articles from writers passing through Le Soleil dans la tête, who thus promoted painter friends, and exchanged advertising space with galleries for copies, ensuring this small review a distribution extending beyond the immediate friendly circle. This process resulted in a correlation between reviews and advertisements: the concept of layout setup highlights the meaningful strength of the typography and composition, as well as its integration into a network of galleries and reviews whose choice points to the defended aesthetic — lyrical abstraction. To impose their values, and notably expressiveness, dialogue, and equivalence between the arts, critics resorted to a poetic style embodying a shared conception of art. Nonetheless, because it defended an aesthetic on the decline until the very end, Sens Plastique only played its role as a rallying point temporarily.
by Ivanne Rialland, Julie Verlaine 2010, in La Revue des revues No. 44.

Printed by René Rougerie, driven by a small group of friends and based at Le Soleil dans la tête which served as a sort of office, wide open to encounters, discoveries, and chance—which is a constant factor of renewal—the review would live for a handful of years (1959-60). Right from the start, it displayed its desire to trigger confrontations between painting and poetry without any prejudice, even if the interplay of friendships had shifted the choice of participating artists, particularly regarding the illustration of the covers. A marked preference for artists of "nuagisme" (Benrath, Duvillier, Laubies, Messagier) in no way prejudges the content, which was not exclusively driven to celebrate this movement, then in full expansion thanks to the intelligent and inspired support of the poet-critic Julien Alvard, whose exhibition "Antagonismes" (at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs) demonstrated the coherence of his argumentation and a definitive inclusion of the artists he defended into the stream of History. Regarding poetry, the choice was often determined by options offered to young poets who thus paid a kind of tribute to an elder.
Excerpt from the blog soleildanslatete