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The quintessence

of utopia

For forty years, as a sculptor, I have been playing with shapes, materials and space. At first the woman, tender, voluptuous, mother or muse, nourishes my inspiration. From the sensual nude magnified by bronze and patinas, in the lineage of Brancusi and post-modern sculpture, I gradually turn to archetypal forms, in the spirit of lyrical abstraction.

Over the years, my Mediterranean and Spanish culture, nourished by my experience in Franche-Comté, the land of utopia, has allowed me to develop a writing characterized by the insertion of abstract figures and geometric forms, inherent to the Arab heritage.

I engrave and chisel calligraphic elements in bronze, I intertwine the "accomplished" numbers, the 3 and the 5. The figures of utopia? In any case, it is impossible to escape this dimension in the cradle of Proudhon, Fourier, the utopian philosophy of the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, initiator of the famous Arc-et-Senans salt works, where I had the honour to exhibit. Perhaps I am looking for the square root of utopia, combining numbers with my favorite form since 2004: the square?

My current research focuses on different types of wood, such as structural beams or end-of-life rail ties. They materialize, with their veins, the weight of the experience whose strata they bear. A fundamental questioning of the before and after, a journey at the rhythm of utopia, the one that allows the artist to transform what is doomed to destruction.

I explore altuglas, steel, wood, stone, marble and glass paste, opening my field of experimentation to combinations of materials, volumes, writings, inclusions and mobile installations. The metal used is a specific alloy processed by a foundry serving the aeronautics industry. It is engraved, chiselled, traversed by calligraphy games evoking communication with the other, the unknown and the infinite.

My work uses a variety of materials as it explores several corpuses of tradition, of mystical thought. It is intended to be a journey around metamorphosis and resurrection. Altuglas is a synthetic glass, "the useful artificial". It is the future, in contrast to the wood symbolizing the past. Structural beams are the link between life, death, what happens after: the finitude of a cycle and the infinity of life, magnified by calligraphy and inclusions on glass plates.

 

Antoine Aranda

 

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