Recycling

Recycling is not easy.

It requires, besides talent/skills, the right material for the right idea at the right moment.

Life is all about recycling. We recycle our knowledges and emotions.

To create is to recycle, to recycle is to create.

Two masters in this art are exhibiting some of their productions in the Galerie Saint-Ravy. I had not seen such an achieved work in these walls for a while. Saint-Ravy is a luxuous place for artists, with its medieval ceiling and columns, and a lot of natural light. The space belongs to the city, which lets it to artists chosen on application files by a commission - the new commission, after the municipal election, will soon start working. The gallery traditionnally presents some very amateurish or very professional exhibitions of paintings, sculptures, photographies, installations. The artists of the week present something different. Eric Dupin makes wooden furnitures, Aurélie Piau, wallpaper.

Eric Dupin recycles parts of old furniture, adding chestnut wood (fine for woodwork and coming from  a local non intensive production...), oak or beech wood, to make new, functionnal, solid and beautifull new furniture. Appropriation, invention. The result is far, far from Ikea: no sharp angles, no cheap finitions, no cheap wood, no nails - the most profane visitor can see the difference. The style is retro, without any exclusivity. The mark of the author is evident, and one can admire on his press-book or website how he works on command for any given space. Surprisingly, given the quality of his work, Eric Dupin is a self-taught joiner. He studied Fine-Arts, agriculture and protection of the environment (he owns a plantation of olive trees). His approach of design is well grounded...

Aurélie Piau is a painter, who started designing wallpaper recently. She draws well, but what is really interesting in my opinion is the way she collects and copies old images in order to produce an offbeat and almost political work. Drawings of children or good housewives of the Fifties can be mixed with skulls in a way that isn't innocently fashionable. The author is legitimately critic toward the society of consommation, the violence of the children, etc. She delivers a coded but understandable message, under an appearance of lighness. Birds often make an appearance on har wallpapers: the ostrich of Muybridge, feathers... Ostrich feathers are not so light. They have been used for panaches, on helmets. Military pride... Interesting that before knowing about the dinausors, men used as trophies feathers from these strangely proportionned huge birds (small head like a diplodocus, big feet as a tyranosausus). In french, the panache is rather glorious. A volcano can have some panache too: we call panache a big plume of smoke. The panache is much less glorious for anybody when it comes from Tchernobyl or Fukushima. The french word plume means feather.

How amazing that ostriches hold such a place in our mental universe while we are so unfamiliar with them. Maybe we are only unfamiliar with winged ostriches, not with human ones. Would you agree, Aurélie?

Have a look at the websites: Eric Dupin & Aurélie Piau.