What I like with sculpture is the possibility to appropriate my environment, to consider the realities of the world as a raw material. The relationship to the material is direct and enables me to revive a quite primitive feeling which was discovered at the dawn of our humanity. Giving shape to earth, stone or wood is for me a way to have some influence on my own existence.

Whereas it is about modelling, moulding, cutting, stamping….these actions give birth to a more intimate relationship with the material, beyond the mere technical aspect. It is a mix of strength and sensuality, a subtle body-to-body. Thanks to the blow of sledgehammer’s «song », the physical effort, the listening to the stone or the attention given to wood, the mind absorbed in the task at hand paradoxically gets released. The balance between creative drive and restraint is precarious but the great concentrating state becomes gradually meditation. Working days and weeks spent in working on a few cubic centimeters of a sculpture give birth to thought ; introspection being put in place allows me to progressively assess the symbolic issue of my work, showing the cathartic virtues of it.

After the exutory, the reconstruction begins. This reconstruction is more than purely intellectual but becomes deeply rooted into the human nature. My search is the one of a cross-cultural man, of a means allowing us to face and sublimate our common fears. The method of approaching metaphysics and myths linked to our relationship to death and the world’s renewal is quite insidious. Then we come to a bare bones eschatology, i.e. an individual death which is a necessary step to revival, to the revival of consciousness. Then I consider myself in a fundamentally optimistic conception where death and chaos finally give way to a world’s reconstruction which is both symbolic and personal. The body works in a quite instinctive way by expressing what words cannot formulate.

François Chaillou