Jean-Marie Perdrix, Sans titre et sans commentaire, 2001, fonte d’un alliage cuivré, 40,7x18x4,5cm.
Courtesy Jean-Marie Perdrix & Galería Desiré Saint Phalle, Mexico city.
My work is based on experimentation. It originates in the social and material production conditions of the situations encountered. My research is both anthropomorphic and political. It uses very different materials (cast iron, bronze, plastic, elastomer, neon) in sculptural embodiments whose forms are determined by the manufacturing process.
Thusly, the iron casts emphasize the contradictions experienced between the statement, the process and the result. The object allows us to witness the entire process from casting of the molten material to its formation without any artifice, without any addition. Shape and materiality are made one.
I have experienced foundries in France, in Russia, in South Korea, in Yugoslavia, in Canada, in Georgia, in Mexico. Some sculptures were autoproduced, while those in Korea and Russia were part of the exhibitions organized by Ponthus Hulten at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in the 1990s.
Since 2002, I have been developing researches in Burkina Faso, in partnership with a bronzer artisan family. We have elaborated a plastic waste recycling craft process adapted to the Sahelian people living conditions The goods were chosen to allow plastics to replace wood, offering an obvious environmental interest in a country threatened by desertification. We have created to sorts of products, one for local markets such as stakes, poles, school tables and the other for export, such as djembes. My partners received an innovation award from the World Bank in Bamako in 2006. We created a cooperative and built a sustainable workshop.
Today I can count on their unfaltering support to create more personal works.
Wherever I stayed, I have tried to invest very different social, political, economic, cultural situations. Each time, it the engagement of the participants in the production of the objects proved essential. Thus the artwork meets the action, whilst taking into account the reality (what is available on site) and installs a hierarchy in the evaluation of material and useful necessities.
My approach asserts the pragmatism in the artistic gesture as a means to produce forms, and according to my geographical position - and that of the artwork- , also asserts the shift from the use value to the symbolic value as an anthropological regime of representation of the artistic act.
Jean-Marie Perdrix
