Guestbook – Shared Glances and Emotions
Sculpture is a complex, strange, and fascinating art form that plays with the third dimension to tame volume and space. From this risky undertaking, each artist, each era, has devised its own interpretation. Renaissance artists in 15th-century Italy, inspired by the great Hellenistic sculpture, were urged to depict the human body in its beauty and perfection. Much later, in the 20th century, Calder, Tinguely, and others focused on sculpting movement: mobiles, still figures, rotating machines… Basque sculptors, now highly acclaimed, such as Chillida, Oteiza, and Ugarte, have theorized on the essential notion of emptiness: the "huts," the void that surrounds the full and constructs space. By thus modeling the body, movement, or emptiness, sculpture reveals itself… infinitely!
Xavier Carrère, with his solid training as a glass artist, likely approached sculpture from a different angle. While his experience allowed him to master the material and his artistic acuity to understand volume and form, it is clearly light that has always characterized Carrère's work. Light, like a fragile and wondrous Ariadne's thread, breathes life into each of the shaped, blown, and joined pieces. Translucent or opaque glass, the brilliance of the materials, the delicacy of the gold reflect, suggest, and invite light. Carrère's sculpture is a pretext for light.
Unusual bubbles of blown glass, the luminous ovolites evoke wonder, illusion, and mirage. The " Links " series is made of antagonism, where the light from the glass reflects and diffracts, pierces and connects the opposing, dense, and compact matter. In his latest works, entitled " Kintsugi ," in homage to a traditional Japanese art, gold, far more than a simple mending, subtly illuminates the damaged material.
Yes, Xavier Carrère is undoubtedly a sculptor, an undisputed sculptor whose every piece, thoughtful, felt, with a proven personality, is marked by the unfailing link that the artist has with light.
Michel de Jaureguiberry
Xavier Carrère is a glass artist who explores matter in motion.
Slow movements of this transparent lava that he manipulates in front of him at the end of his cane, as if to elucidate the mystery of Creation.
Carrère seeks an answer in the reflections of the glass, much like augurs observed the sky hoping to read some detail concerning their destiny. He seeks a flash of insight through the iridescence, the shimmering, the diffractions of this soft paste that transforms like an ephemeral moment frozen in eternity.
Solid and fragile sculptures, like challenges to logic, association in conjunction of antinomic elements and forms, juxtaposition of opposites or antithetical subjects, Carrère crosses poles or connects incompatible molecules.
Facing the sea or in the wind, the artist strives, with energy or gentleness, to join the two ends, the two ends of infinity, as if he wanted to find the junction between opposites, like improbable love stories or impossible mixtures.
between silence and stone,
between earth and light,
between the fluid and the acute angles,
between the concrete and the abstract.
Just as air and water gave birth to life, Xavier Carrère tells us the story of the birth of the world, the random and planetary history of visceral mineral matter that melts and merges in a ballet of atoms.
The story of the universe in action as elementary particles collide or bind together,
The symbolic or playful history of human relationships, of associations and surprise unions when the fire of passion engenders bonds in tension, the story of those who associate to feel good, to feel better in the warmth of this bubble of life that serves as their reference point.
No matter how complex the path to achieving them, the simplest ideas are always the best.
No frills or unnecessary details, no artificial ornaments, no, no artificial artifice to pervert the pure beauty of Xavier Carrère's work, which endlessly pursues a quest for the essential.
Xavier Carrère, an essential artist.
CharlElie Couture