Ricou Gallery, Brussels
For its second consecutive participation to ART-O-RAMA, Ricou Gallery offers to present a solo show by French artist Étienne Bossut (born in Saint-Chamond in 1946 – lives and works in Dôle, France).
“To be in tune with the mass production era is a real motivation to me, I manage to do so by handcrafting by myself, in my studio, traditional objects that are spit out of machines, not by irony or some taste for paradox, but in order to sort of be part of it.”
Through his work of sculpture and particularly moulding, Étienne Bossut reminds us that the appropriation of object is built in parallel with the mastering of a medium and its specificities. The proof is his constant use of plastic as main medium.
However, he does not anchor his work in the reproduction of objects, as he seeks to highlight the handcraft nature by intentionally leaving visible technical defects. If plastic goes back to the industrial era, moulding goes back to an even more ancient practice which is often related to the art of funeral masks. The latter, produced just before the decomposition, freezes the face into one moment and state forever. The artist explicitly refers to it since he describes objects as “last minute images”, images that freeze the state of an object, whereas it will continue to age and transform.