Material zoom: Steel

Good morning,

Today, I want to introduce you to one of my favorite materials: Steel.

Before working on it artistically, I knew it in the industrial world, working in areas such as foundry, metalwork, cutlery, blacksmithing...

I often compare steel to a fiery Camargue horse compared to the draft horse which is similar to bronze.

For my creations, I chose to make metal lace using a dripping technique.

Metal dripping
Talking about Dripping in sculpture without falling into a flow of paint on a three-dimensional support seems to be a challenge. An action and a project that seems to be a challenge or a bet.
But observing closely, I melt the metal and it flows drop by drop to give a random shape. The participation of the whole body is present and not just the intellect. Then the paradox can be glimpsed, we feel the curtain rising and a solution to this alternative is revealed.
Dripping, as Jackson Pollock was fond of, is an access to an unconscious, bodily buried, archetypal memory. An evanescent divine chance brought to light and shaped.
The classical or abstract internalized projection then in the sand, frozen in the space of the mold, receives by fusion, liquefaction, the drops one after the other. The loss of control and access to another dimension are the key words of the discourse, of communication between the sculpture and the sculptor.
Alchemy is not far away: “ora et labora”. The Emerald Tablet says: “you will separate the subtle from the thick with great engineering… it rises from the earth to the sky, and again it descends to the earth, and receives the force of things above and below . »
Hollows and bumps, voids and solids, accidents create a play between light and shadow. This lace is a suggestive creation that appeals to the idyllic, chimerical, archetypal, or obscure, black history of each individual. A personal story is regenerated, recomposing the work. She reinvents her own story like an alluvium dragged by the current of the river, of life. It transforms in an infinitesimal or radical way, the individual I of the creator and the spectator into a new revisited.
Our personal history, real or told cognitive memories, is rebuilt with each frozen drop of eternity. But through our eyes, the laces become soluble in our personal story which is endless unlike the tales whose end we know. Even death, however ineducable, will not get the better of our personal stories told in private or in broad daylight.
This acquired and specific property of never having an end and the power to take a new detour at every second, are the source of individual freedom. All recast cognitive histories are the means of reconstructing his world, our world.
Gnostics and agnostics come together as opposites come together. In this forest of real, idyllic, archetypal stories, consciously or unconsciously constructed, the creative role of each, stimulated by the gaze and the emotion of a work to be finished, leads to growth towards regained individual freedom.
Sculptural Dripping can then come to life and inspire other creatives in this voice of the inventive spirit.

  I melt the steel bars drop by drop

  in a sand mold.

  Once the casting is complete, the finishing begins.

  I brush my sculptures to reveal the nuances of the metal.

Some examples of steel sculptures: (click on the photos to access the complete file)