Galerie de l'Est - Darya Brient
Étienne Jacobée
Calvary IX , 2022 - 2025
Steel, pigments, earth bark Unique piece The Calvaries first appeared in Etienne Jacobée’s work in 2019. Sculptures of fossilized bodies, plants, and minerals have become a landscape of elements resonating with one another, like those Saharan rocks where the sand‑laden wind, through corrasion, awakens forms that have lain dormant for millennia within the depth of matter. Outdoors, the ever‑changing light transforms the apparent stillness of the sculpture. This is particularly evident in these pieces built from a multitude of planes, like facets that catch light or shadow depending on the time of day. They offer a wealth of readings of the form, revealing different aspects and unfolding a different story with each passing moment. Jacobée uses earth on some of his Calvaries, inspired by the sacrificial altars stained with dried blood that he discovered during the Dogon exhibition at the Musée Dapper in 1994. The earth acts as a sedimentary crust that reinforces the timelessness of the element, as if it had been unearthed by an archaeologist. Another source goes back to 1991 in Togo, where he worked with the blacksmiths of Sokodé and was deeply marked by the earthen architecture of termite mounds and the red of laterite. He is particularly drawn to the idea of sculpture evolving over time, gradually covered in moss, like those standing stones left as vestiges of another civilization. He envisions a sculpture appearing unexpectedly along a path, at the edge of a field, at the entrance to a wood, or even deep in the forest. “My Calvaries,” the artist confides, “I see them abandoned, forgotten in the middle of nowhere, revealing their character through the elements, marked by cold, wind and sun, slowly eaten away by oxidation and covered in lichen.” As art historian Emmanuel Daydé wrote in Le songe de Jacobée in 2020: “At the crossroads of the most ancient past and the most distant future, [these sculptures] evoke both the mysterious alignments of the prehistoric menhirs of Carnac and the megaliths, now fallen, of the Chantilly forest.”159 x 47 x 43 cm
12 000,00 €
