More or less affirmed heirs of the avant-garde movements of the late 1960s (Minimal art, Land art), the artists showing here have the common feature of being sculptors determined to explore the multiple meanings of space: that generated by the spectator’s body, architectural volumes, mental and imaginary space, the expanse of the cosmos, etc., by probing and forcing it, going beyond it and reinventing it. Each in his or her own way wants to push back the physical limits of space and investigate all its dimensions, including the temporal ones. The artists are thus interested in formal and mental quests for hypothetical kinds of space and in the manipulation of the idea of universes, driven by the attraction of the non-representable.
They are both deconstructors and illusionists, and ‘makers’ in the sense that they invent strange spaces at the boundary of the irrational—nonetheless with lucidity—by freely adopting both scientific models and artistic references. Remembering the fundamentals of twentieth century sculpture sheds light on the issues of the exhibition and underlines the maturity of the work accomplished by these young artists and their capacity to reuse radica artistic research.
Speculative material, space is often made theatrical by the fabricateurs, with finds, stories, demolitions and transformations. Wishing to call stability and gravity into question, the artists create works that combine thinking and experience of space. The narrative power of the works can thus lead to new representations of space, and their kinetic potential calls for fresh perception by the visitor.
Fabricateurs d’espaces means a search for weightlessness and new expression in sculpture using broad imagination; but with a fibre that is sometimes critical and sometimes playful with regard to human and terrestrial limits. This is clearly a question of utopia, with that of a future to be reinvented, that runs through this exhibition.
