My Critical Figuration journey

From my first sculptures, I considered myself as a sculptor who deliberately and completely subscribed to Critical Figuration.

These different figurative sculptures were created between 1982 and 1996. They start with a series of faces where the emphasis is on the characters of individual people. The mode of expression is critical, and often borders on caricature. This first series, I called it, with a touch of irony: “Lovely little faces“, ironic because the characters are sometimes sinister, and often antipathetic. The influence of Daumier‘s parliamentarians is obvious, but we can also think of the grinning expressions of a certain Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

[Bronze sculpture. Peasant. Worker. Worker.

The peasant]

All the series that followed are only successive researches to escape me (manage to free oneself) from this double and famous fatherhood.

Attempts will be made to change format with the Men bas-reliefs, or the Big Heads…

or by adding a body, more or less well defined (The traveling companions), but trying to keep all the critical load on the faces

The series of “Men and Machines” will close this first period. The introduction of a context, with some absurd machines made with recovery materials, will be a decisive step in my sculptor’s evolution, and will allow me to slide my sculptures from figurative to “outsider” way.

All these figurative sculptures were made initially with clay modeling. The end result was left in a raw form or sometimes glazed terracotta. Some pieces have been treated by the Japanese technique of raku. Others were realized in bronze after lost wax process.

Two other series can be linked to this series of figurative sculptures: Eros and Thanatos (love and death)