That for which there is no word.

Since my childhood, I have been feeling a deep need to express myself through shapes and colours. This has helped me overcome difficult times, consolidate myself and transform my doubts and sorrows into something that can be called pleasure and gives me the desire to move forward. Initially, it was a purely personal exercise, but eventually, after I studied applied arts and attended the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, I realised my personal language could also arise interest and understanding among others; that it could touch beyond words, languages, borders and could be shared.

To tell the truth, I do not feel the need to express my ideas in words; shapes and colours suffice. What I would like to do is not to put an image on words but to sculpt or paint the unspeakable. Whatever I write about my work is therefore more like an attempt to explain it a posteriori.

Although my creations appear to be abstract, they are based on sentimental notions that often relate to the human; I seek such a relationship between Abstraction and Feeling. As far as I am concerned, Abstraction remains the best way to express what I feel. At some point, I did attempt to resort to figuration to achieve the same result, yet it turned out that the paintings and sculptures of faces I produced left me with a sense of vacuity, reflecting only a facade, a barrier. Those few months of trials and errors helped me realise I was looking for something buried deeper in my soul, something I am still looking for today.

The materials I use are various in nature: terracotta, wood, stone, bronze, cement, paper, paint.

I work in series of variations on a given theme or feeling, until I sense my work is running out of breath, as I begin to repeat myself and my desire peters out. That is when I change materials or choose another mode of expression. While such successive changes in materials may appear to give slightly drastic results, in fact, the meaning remains the same, the way the form is constructed keeps following the same progression. Based on that same logic, my paintings or drawings are as important to me as my sculptures; they participate in the evolution of my work, one element helping the other to keep progressing.

My drawings or paintings are built like my sculptures, by successive layers. Layers of acrylic, water, oil paint. The colours are the same as for the sculptures, earth colours: ochre, white, red, black and brown. I draw with pencil the outer structure, the boards. I am looking for the balance between construction and internal movement.

All such drawings are not sketches for my sculptures; they serve as a basis for reflection and trigger ideas to keep progressing further. I like the free flow of gesture; the work under situations of "emergency"; the swiftness of drawing. However, this can also be a more distressing process in the sense that it no longer affords the time inherent to the more tedious execution of a sculpture, a time that allows for a "digestion" of the result. Returning to sculpture and to the satisfaction of what can be at times a tedious confrontation with harder materials is all the more soothing.

Within virtually all of my sculptures - "Human-boxes", "Black Boxes", "Boxes and Cores", "Apparences", "Flow and flow", "Construction around a wave", etc. - in fact in virtually all of my sculptures, a core can be found, sometimes hidden, sometimes partly apparent. It is concealed and protected by a construction built around it.

If in stone, the construction around the core is built from bottom to top, like a wall. Smooth or rough stones, they contain wavy shapes, repetitive waves of ebb and flow giving a feeling of movement in opposition to the fixity of the architectural structure that surrounds them.

If in wood, the assembly around the core seems to be made hurriedly, as a protective box, an armour, a barricade to protect and preserve the fragile terracotta core. The boxes are then painted with successive layers of colours that gradually unite the different materials to recreate a solid and homogeneous shape. Colour transitions attenuate the particularity of each material and make it "one", both skin and soul, recreating a new entity.

TIME... With concrete or cast aluminum sculptures - "Rolled by the sea" - I wanted to "age" these pieces, give the illusion of a body gradually transformed, rolled and mistreated by time. A union or osmosis has been created between the core and its envelope. The surfaces are eroded, sediments have been deposited there. The tossed sculptures are naturally stopped in their movements, after being rolled; they are as if stranded. Perhaps at rest?

In my research, the notion of inner or core space is important; no less important is the notion of time, present, past and future. What I am striving to do is freeze moments in time, suspend them, capture them and share them.

Short suspended moments, the crossing of a look, a thought, sculpting that for which there is no word.

On 12/12/2023

SR.

Translated by Jacques CARRIO