My work is contemporary sculpture. I create abstract three dimensional compositions by transforming reused materials sourced from industrial scrap, waste generated from construction sites or past projects at my workshop. The resulting sculptures deal with current issues of production, consumption and ecology. They raise the question of sustainability in our society because after transforming the materials into perfectly well finished art pieces the audience could hardly realize where they come from. This act of decontextualization should generate awareness of the fact that our industry simply generates too much waste as a byproduct for creating goods.

 

The process starts by adopting a material and transforming it into simple identical elements, for example a geometrical block and arranging many of them together. It is a playful act, the human instinct we all have to move and toy with objects at our reach. Sometimes while playing with physical pieces an interesting geometrical pattern emerges, which I then try to replicate and immortalize in a sculpture, while also studying variations in angles and proportions for new works to evolve. The other possibility of this interaction is a completely abstract sculpture, a form that has no relation to our subconscious. It is sometimes hard to create shapes, which have no resemblance to figures, animals, trees or any image stored in our mind, but the challenge is also a form of transforming and decontextualizing matter.

 

Two elements that make my work unique are material contrasts and processes. I mostly experiment with scrap industrial materials like aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic resins and combine them with organic ones, such as regional stones or even wood, depending of what I can source. The resulting contrast is not only physical in terms of color, finish or texture, but also symbolic. For instance, industrial materials even if recently discarded are new and man-made, the result of a technological transformation while organic matter is mostly older and the consequence of natural phenomena, like a stone cast a thousand years ago from an erupting volcano. The combination of both creates a contradiction in nature, a reflection of our footprint on the planet.

 

As for processes, sculpture represents for me an ongoing research in finding ways to transform, shape and finish matter. Some works demand for instance computer abilities their define proportions in a virtual 3D world and which I then take the result to reality by merely printing a construction plan with measurements or even sending the data to a CNC (computer numerical control) machine to e.g. cut by laser a given shape. Other creations require the design of special tools and devices to be able to transform them. Even free-hand drawing and a lot of manual work to sand or paint surfaces is needed in the actual construction of a sculpture.