Sculpture project Okinawa #3, 2024

Coral, wood, brass threaded rods, brass nuts and cap nuts, wheels
Approx. 30 x 41 x 40 cm

Price incl. VAT

Point of departure or escape, travel gives rise to the works here. Borders, flows, migrations, mass tourism... The question of travel, circulation and ecology is a recurrent theme in contemporary art. And the artist who is travelling, wherever he may be, maintains an uninterrupted dialogue with the objects he needs and those he produces, the situations he witnesses and those he creates. A source of inspiration, influence and exchange, travel enables the artist to appropriate new geographies, to experience other forms and limits, to broaden their gaze while accepting the lacunar aspect of every experience. A vector of decentering and a factor in transfiguring the banal, travel offers the artist a poetic time to live and work. It offers a glimpse of new horizons, real or imaginary, of changing their modus operandi, and experimenting with new materials, media and techniques.

 Combining spatial and temporal journeys, the exhibition aims to implement what was brought back in the suitcases, items collected far away, what remains in memory, all those images, sensations, experiences and afterimages, because leaving is also and already returning. All these captures, these “gleanings”, which can be seen as forms of predation, are also archaic gestures responding to symbolic needs, gestures that find many echoes or uses in the field of contemporary art.

The fragments of dead coral spotted on the beaches of Okinawa (Japan) seem capable of generating poetic pareidolia and refer to forms that are already referenced or assignable: codes, graphemes belonging to a primitive script, to a language that would be dead today, but also emblematic sculptures from the History of art (Louise Bourgeois, Hans Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Isamu Noguchi, …). 

 Text: Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin about John Cornu's exhibition LETTRES MORTES at Galerie Gilla Loercher, Berlin, 2024