for the “Horse-drawn Coach” of Xavier Veilhan
I joined the Enzyme Design Company in Montreuil for the construction of three horses for a new edition of the “Coach of Veilhan”.
The original work of art, inaugurated in Versailles, heavily influenced me during my Art studies.
It was thus with pride and desire that I applied myself to mould the three horses, like a puzzle with folded sheets, a sort of metal body adjusted methodically by the designers of Enzyme Design.
You find out quickly if a guy is good with a hammer when he goes to strike the anvil— if the sound is right, he’s hired !
Surrounded by a small team of sheet metal workers and prototype designers who showed me their techniques throughout the process, it took several months to achieve the desired result: three geometric figures with taut edges, faceted, perfectly level, sanded perfectly to then be painted.
Entrusted equally to place the piece at the collector’s home, we spent several days on the installation of the piece in the park of a Chateau outside of London.
Not long ago, I was interviewed at the Gare de Nantes by a local journalist. The journalist asked me how to best describe my contribution to the concrete tree sculpture; as an artist or an artisan? Normally, this type of question would have left me speechless, had I not thankfully prepared a very polite, very vague answer:
“we are a bit of both”