In the Japanese tradition, the word sculptor applies to a man who searches riverbeds for well-turned stones … as the grace and favour of the rivers’ waters offer. As far back as my childhood reaches, it may have been my very first approach. That Durance River of mine ! The stones I find today have been dancing from time immemorial in a brook whose swirling waters roll, erode and hollow marble blocks snatched from the mountainside. Rough and wild beauties as the brook itself, those “natural marbles” come from a metamorphic vein blazing with red and glazing with bluish grey. Need I say that after their years-and-millennia stay in the riverbed and the earth womb, my only contribution is the finishing touch. Such a touch won’t create from an undifferentiated mass of clay; it will instead be bold enough to come to terms with “the wild” of nature which is there and compelling recognition. It is the touch of a hand that reaches out to the world, allows itself to be seduced while it “playfully” deals with the given stone, with its shape and streaks and constraints. Therefore, what imposes on the sculptor is direct carving, without any preparatory sketch or preparatory work of any sort … but a mere guess. Repeating the approach or the style of the previous stone is out of question : each time must be a first time. It all consists in responding each new stone, so as to “invent” it in its singular shape; it all aims at giving adventure a chance : leaving it to it, and come what may. All my part is to progressively adapt, until I finally release the best that can be pulled clear of the block, until I have cut its finest figure and made the latter evident to all; until it stands in all its majesty and this majesty were all on its account, totally its own, totally natural … in short, as if the stone had just been restored to its very majesty and I was to be regarded as the person who –no matter the marble blocks !- had merely polished up an astonishingly wide range of beautiful pebbles. The person who had merely caressed them.

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)