Elmar Trenkwalder lives and works in Innsbruck in the Austrian Tyrol, and perhaps it's the steep ravines or the vertigo-inducing peaks of the Alps that impressed on Elmar Trenkwalder the idea for such gigantic sculptures, their dimensions so great as to taunt little human beings. Free from the particulars of any culture or period, they emerge somewhere between the baroque of the Plague column and the ornamental complexity of a Khmer temple, between Adolf Wölfi and Louise Bourgeois, Chinese statuary and visionary architecture, obvious sexual connotations and Buddhist spirituality. 

There is something Jungian in the work of Trenkwalder. And when La Maison Rouge presents six of his monumental sculptures (three of which produced specially for the occasion) coupled with a selection of works by mediumistic French painter Augustin Lesage (1876-1954), it is doing so probably in order to underscore Trenkwalder's exuberant spirit, akin to the collective unconscious postulated by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Lesage, a coal miner from the Pas-de-Calais, claimed never to have painted except under the explicit dictation of certain spirits, among them Leonardo da Vinci and Marius (Appolonios) de Tyane. As for Trenkwalder, who confesses never to have traveled in non-Western countries, he describes the artistic act as a "process of inhalation (of forms, images, and emotions)" of the world.

Both artists seem to hold on to a kind of "elsewhere" that reaches them by way of mysterious energies or unconscious flows. It is as if, far from being historically and geographically sedimented, distinct periods and cultures were constantly moving in a kind of gaseous element, their emanations arriving, one knows not how, at the brain of the artist, who might have no knowledge of the process.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious explains "the fact that the unconscious of many, among the most distant races and peoples, present remarkable analogies. These analogies are manifest in the phenomenon of extraordinary accord between mythical themes and forms, each of autochthonous origins yet found under the most different latitudes." Gazing over the labyrinthine peaks and troughs, the vegetal or anthropomorphic decors of Elmar Trenkwalder's immense, enameled clay, one delves deeper than into the artist's imagination, deeper even than into its mere aesthetic dimension – straight into the soul of the world.

It is not a transcendent soul, but it surges everywhere, gushing, exalted, alive. Far from being petrified, frozen under the varnish, the clay shaped by Trenkwalder testifies again and again to the exuberant, generative profusion of the Alpine landscapes, where it first saw the light – valleys and mountains, waterfalls and lakes, forests and pastures – while on its enamel surface there shimmers the entire universe.

Augustin Lesage and Elmar Trenkwalder: Les Inspirés shows until September 7 at La Maison Rouge, Paris.