Ruidosa, Texas
Romain Froquet vigorously scrapes his iron file back and forth against a fist-sized rock until powder begins to form a pile next to it on a rough wooden table. This rock and others, all collected from the surrounding desert, will form his paint pallette—mostly various shades of ochre, from a yellowish hue to deeper browns, along with a reddish tint and a deep black made from mesquite wood charcoal. He’s in the sacristy of an abandoned adobe church, with no roof above his head, a view that reveals the blue sky, also another color in his palette that he obtained from Chihuahua, Mexico.
“When you work with natural pigment from here, it means there is the DNA of the place here in the painting,” he says. “It’s essentially tempera painting,” and he notes how when he arrived at the church in Ruidosa, some 36 miles of rugged road west of the nearest city, he had everything he needed for his work creating an installation except one thing. “We forgot the eggs,” he says, after showing how a mix of the rock powders, water and egg makes his paint.
On Tuesday, I got a sneak preview of his installation that hung from the ceiling of the church, some 30 feet above—a 5-foot-wide cotton canvas painted with broad lines, some bold, some soft, that drapes to the dirt floor into a roll around a piece of wood, leaving the length to the imagination. The fabric canvas sways softly in the breeze that flows through the church, and it becomes clear that when finished, the entirety of the church’s main room will be a colorful array of these flowing fabrics.
Froquet, an internationally recognized artist from France, came to Far West Texas a week prior at the invitation of the Friends of the Ruidosa Church, the Marfa and Presidio-based nonprofit restoring the massive adobe church perched on the Rio Grande. The town of Ruidosa was once a thriving farming community of more than a thousand, and its Catholic Church—El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús (The Sacred Heart of the Church of Jesus)—was the spiritual and communal anchor for those seeking masses, funerals, weddings and celebrations. The church, which included two towers and an immense, arched roof, was built in 1915, handcrafted by locals with individual adobe bricks made of mud, sand and sometimes straw.
Little did the town know a dam built in New Mexico in 1916, and subsequent dams and flood control, would rob the Rio Grande of water, eventually leaving the farmlands with no water and causing a gradual migration of residents out of the town. Eventually, only a dozen or so residents remained, and by the 1950s, the church was abandoned. Years of relentless sun, wind and rain left the structure crumbling. Attempts to maintain the adobe were mounted over the years, but it wasn’t until the Friends nonprofit formed and took ownership of the church that significant renovation began—supported by a combination of grants and donations.
For Froquet, the lonely church and surrounding harsh desert are inspiring, and he is exuberant about supporting the restoration project. His installation will be a focal point of the nonprofit’s Community Day on Saturday, November 1, from 1 to 6 p.m. at the church—featuring free food and drink, along with music and dancers from Presidio. The installation will then move to Marfa for a full display at Do Right Hall, and Froquet will then cut the fabrics into squares and frame them for sale to benefit the Friends of the Ruidosa Church.
For Froquet, his painted lines have a deep meaning surrounding Connections, a previous installation of sorts in the desert near Terlingua. Lines raked and dug into the soil, along with found objects in lines, speak to the connections between nature and humankind. But the creations also are about divisions in space and the connections between them.
“The beginning of everything for me as an artist, as a human, I really believe that we are all connected,” he says. “We meet today, and we create a connection. We are also connected to the ground, but we don’t see these connections.” A documentary on Connections was shown at the Crowley Theatre in Marfa last week to further explore Froquet’s work before the Ruidosa church Community Day.
The back wall of the church is gone, providing a giant window to view a few remaining houses in Ruidosa. A horse wanders toward the church on the deserted highway outside. It’s a moment of interest for Froquet’s son Marcus, who has been practicing his own broad strokes on pieces of cardboard inside the church. Wearing a cowboy hat, he freely roams the church and patiently watches his father work. Also accompanying Froquet is his partner, Estelle Domergue, part of his team, he says.
Froquet continues the exploration of his lines. “You make your point A, then point B, you trace a layer, a line. This is a connection, but this line is also a border and it makes a division. It creates two spaces. So how can you connect and divide at the same time? This is what the line is.”
“It’s also a connection and the division,” he says. “So this is what I am questioning through my installation work, painting work. It’s an abstract language born from repetition of gestures. So what I do is gesture, big gesture, small gesture, to create something magical for the space.” And thus, his installation will be titled Gesture: The Sound of Ruidosa, which seeks to honor what has vanished and highlight what endures.
Froquet, who is self taught, considers himself a painter at heart, even though his large-scale installations have adorned giant buildings in France and have given him a reputation somewhat of a street artist. A recent installation in one of Lyon, France’s most famous public spaces, Tissage Urbain, includes arched walkways covered and draped in vibrant lines that invite visitors to walk beneath them—again forming connections of lines and the humans traversing them.
Froquet demonstrates his work, slowly tracing a wide brush over framed cotton fabric, which he found in Ojinaga. He ruminates about a recent transition in his work. “I grew up equally in nature and in the city. We spent many, many years the big city like Paris. And I left Paris four, five years ago, and we live now in the middle of nature in France. It’s beautiful, the countryside.”
“My studio faces the forest, and it changed many things. We did this big change because I wanted to explore something else, because I really believe that we are inspired by what we have around us, and I needed to change my environment.”
The change also moved him to use natural materials in his installations. “So I collect a lot of things like wood and rocks,” he says. “I felt that I could come back to West Texas. I really wanted to come back here to make some artwork, creation, a residence. I wanted to explore here.”
A single-day exhibition curated by Yvonamor Palix at Do Right Hall will be hosted on Wednesday, November 5, following Community Day.