"Max Coulon's figurative sculptures draw from a repertoire of found objects, playful forms, and architectural conventions. His sampling techniques intersect contradictory operations, including the repair of ruined objects and the distortion of ornamental archetypes. He tests architectural models, both classical and modern, reinterpreting them through intuitive gestures, simultaneously within and outside the academic framework. The logics of canonical sculpture, dictating balance, calibration, and symmetry, are destabilized only to be further highlighted.
The artist takes inspiration from the norms and ornamental features of neoclassical style, neo-Gothic creatures, and grotesque fantasies. Their architects built strong figures, powerful images to support structures. Both as an heir to and in reaction to this legacy, Max Coulon parodies these genres that excel in the art of citation. He treats motifs as inanimate bodies whose material he stirs. His objects, carved from solid masses, are derived from Atlantes and Caryatids, then return to a primitive state of sculpture, where the base relearns how to support itself. The artist shapes juvenile forms with robust materials like wood and concrete.
He lets himself be guided by their properties, freeing them from technical constraints to reveal the form they sometimes already contain. From glued fragments and swollen joints arise various scars. By provoking these imperfections, these aggregates of molded objects and sculpted raw materials expose a kind of nomos of materials. Their personalities are embodied in animal figures, bas-reliefs of the Seven Dwarfs, or even house models. Generating their own proportion, Max Coulon invokes a reality scaled to his anthropomorphic sculptures.
This world of toys, parodying that of adults – from its comical or morbid characters, including riot police, alcoholics, and landlords – caricatures their fictions and systems of authority in one sweeping motion."
© Texte : Lila Torquéo, 2021
Presented by Romero Paprocki
