Developing a new "Poetics" of stone

Stone has passed into the wood and wood has passed into the stone. Whether stone or wood, something is worming its way in, infiltrating and merging. In the veins of the stone and wood, signs "outside language" specify their shapes. Jean-Jacques Lapoirie has become a master of the phrasing of the tiniest vein and presents a constantly-renewed catalogue of them.

A colour is petrified and fixed: the one singled out by the intelligence of trial and error. What is gnawed away from inside rises to the surface. As a sculptor, Jean-Jacques Lapoirie reveals it and engraves it with the signs that count. He has successfully avoided two pitfalls: fashionable concepts and decoration evoking nostalgia for times past.

Where does what he proposes come from? It originates in a craftsman's practice of sculpture, paper-making and the production of miscellaneous objects. When they are exhibited, it causes the lines to shift, transforming the representations into patterns whose references become remote, breaking away from their moorings.

It is possible to follow the course of the engraver on the material of his slab. He digs – both literally and metaphorically – a furrow of his own among the tangle of possible paths. By skilfully arranging his abundant productions, Jean-Jacques Lapoirie constructs hybrid spaces in order to lose his references – while preserving the element of surprise.

Drawn out of wood, drawn out of stone: it may be useful here to speak of deterritorialization and movements specific to the world of nature: salmon, locusts, solar or magnetic storms... Organizing material in its frictions and its infinitely varied modifications, Jean-Jacques Lapoirie shows the "resultants": a given moment of the sharp tip which opens up the impatience of a whirlpool, of flow, of currents. He displaces the different ways of fitting things together by setting up the combinations of possible universes.

Jean-Louis Vincendeau                     

Translated from french into english : Tom Landon