" “A man and a woman in love border on the divine” (The Magic Flute); The Song of Songs; The couple –the nuptial vows between a man and a woman- has a central position in my sculpture. No matter if the spirit of that couple is one of breath, or one of fire, one of springing water, or one where exchange and mutual contemplation bear calm and rest. Couple has inspired me a hundred different sculptures, which is so far above the number of sculptures inspired to me by the theme of woman –I won’t even mention marble creations. Time working its decanting work to the essentials, that theme has become my very own mould. Do not mistake it for some feeding and magnifying of an ideal vision in lyrical exaltation. Or for a mawkish drift. I would not either fall into harshness and debasement when dealing with it, or into sorrow and imprecation. Nor would I choose provocation through eroticism for its own sake. I just happen to be extremely susceptible to that portion in others, and to feel a boundless gratitude for what life presented me with –a blend of fortunes by turns felicitous and serious. Although those two features inevitably leave their characteristic print of humility on a sculpted transcription, they also bring into the rendering a gentleness tinged with a vital thrust, along with some sort of humanity pervaded with happiness. It must be kept in mind that, as bodies themselves can convey the innermost dialogues of souls and hearts among themselves, sculpture has the power to convey body expressions in a hyperbolic style. Desire, for instance, is the buried -often little shared- side of a loving relationship. Well do we take into account the role of genes, of frustration and boredom, of reluctance and disinclination, and that of the shade behind the light of a personality. But my purpose consists precisely into avoiding sculpting shady figures in the shades. I aim at arousing another way of considering that dimension of our lives that we usually regard as trivial and that leaves us torn asunder both because of its slur of discredit and of the envy we keep subduing and repressing. I work where the guilty approach of sex life inherited from our Christian culture meets every person’s innermost life, his/her education, disappointments, traumatisms, as well as his/her absence of desire. One creation comes to my mind as the illustration of that : in “The Bridges of Madison County”, a man and a woman experiencing through and through how trivial their lives may be and how despising their family circles may equally be, are transformed by the film and the alchemy of love into a deeply moving nugget of a couple.

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)