Guillaume Couffignal, Bronze Architectural Abstract Theater Model French Contemporary Sculpture, 2014

Description

Guillaume Couffignal (French b. 1964)
Theatre, 2014. Bronze.
19 7/8 x 13 1/2 x 7 1/4 inches.
Signed on the … more Guillaume Couffignal (French b. 1964)
Theatre, 2014. Bronze.
19 7/8 x 13 1/2 x 7 1/4 inches.
Signed on the base: Couffignal. Beautiful texture and patina.

Guillaume Couffignal is a French Postwar & Contemporary self taught, outsider artist who was born in 1964. He works in bronze casting complex, fantastic, architecture models, abstract theater and boat models that look like relics from the past. He learned the art of lost wax casting with a traditional African foundry in Koudougou, Burkina Faso in Africa when he was 23, blessed to find his way so young. He felt the deep alchemy of the process combining the elements of Nature to produce a concept that did not previously exist in our world. He saw the potential of this earth magic. It forces chance and pushes the limits of bronze because each sculpture can never be exactly reproduced.
Like the use of clay, this art has a deep connection with the primitive elements of Nature. There is the wind and the sky and the earth and the fire. There are ashes and dust. Here exists a collaboration with the spirit of the Illusionist, an artist in all his unpredictability.
But it is not an art of chance. The Illusionist / artist masters the elements of accident and surprise. He is a magician who controls the secrets of his process. In the case of Couffignal, this has to do with the three-dimensional collage of carefully chosen fragments and shapes and with its earth-like textures, carefully perfected over many years of experimentation.
Its textures make the materials lie. They have an irregular patina of wear and bad weather. They make bronze itself secondary with this creamy pigmentation of the earth burnt by the sun. The texture then becomes a painting.
Couffignal sets the scene for the pure drama of the void. He fills it with memories and voices. This decor is visually minimal, but this very minimalism points to the importance of his other intentions. Its boats are "soul boats" caught between two universes. Its architectural pieces evoke ruins and nevertheless attest to their own existence.
Although this process is ancient, and in this case learned from the African tradition, the true testimony of the power of Guillaume Couffignal is that not a single element of his work derives from something existing. As a true iconoclast, he has taken up a traditional language, learned this language, and starting from this language has created a poetry completely unique and unique to him. Randal Morris, 2013. His work is from the tradition of outsider art, art brut, folk art, naïve art, visionary art and intuitive art with a sophisticated subject matter. A kind of symbiosis of jean Dubuffet and Daniel Arsham.
Sculptures as forgotten images of a world where the trace always precedes presence. As in the art of raku, ancestral Japanese pottery where the cooking accident and the patina of use - wabi and sabi - testify to an intimate cosmogonic geography. Omnipresent memory of the color and the smell of the earth - mud, noble material which in Africa is used to erect huts, houses, palaces and mosques. Historically and up to the margins of the caravan route, on the borders of the great Arabic Muslim empires of the West African Middle Ages. The earth, the color of the Sahel. Infinite variation of ocher: from the red of laterite to the white of kaolin. From drought to tropical rains. “To sculpt is to remove the flesh until you feel the skeleton, the original substance of everything, under your fingers. "
Guillaume Couffignal.

SELECT EXHIBITIONS
Spirit Codex, Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York, NY
Galerie Christine Colon, Liège, Belgium
Robin des Bois, St Léger la Montagne, France
Outsider Art Fair New York, represented by Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York, NY
Galerie Brigitte Ruffin, La Rochelle, France
Pragmata Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
ST’ART Strasbourg, Galerie Richard Nicolet, France
Salon Révélations, Grand Palais, Galerie Eric Dumont, Paris, France
Galerie Brûlée, Strasbourg, France
Fonderie Aixe-sur-Vienne, France
Galerie Christine Colon, Waremme, Belgium less