Born in 1938 in Paris (FR)
Lives and works in New York City, New York (US)
1983
Welded steel, bronze patina
Dimensions variables
Actuellement en dépôt : Musée départemental d'art ancien et contemporain, Epinal
Year of Purchase: 1984
Michel Gérard is one of those rare French artists to have been really ‘accepted’ in the United States, where he has lived since 1989. His sculpture grapples with various materials, from the toughest (steel) to the most fragile and malleable (paper pulp, foam rubber). The strength deployed in his monumental works is nothing less than Herculean. People have linked his work with Arte povera, and the word Antiform. The fact is that his work sidesteps the rhetoric of the object, juggling with materials in order to introduce into perception an emotion which calls for the onlooker’s intellectual complicity.
The sculpture titled “Entaille nouée” (Knotted Notch) is typical of the work produced by Michel Gérard on the memory of the earth and the history of industry as a quasi-archaeological object, even if, as he puts it himself, ‘when you are in it, it is no longer a myth, or a history, or a theory’, ‘the forge burns images (like the desert)’. The work is made up of three elements made of wrought steel which are placed directly on the ground, with no pedestal or stand, or as if the stand itself became the work, in the extension of the problem-set introduced into the history of modern sculpture by Rodin himself, with whom it is not indecent to compare Michel Gérard… His concern for placing sculptures in a natural setting authorizes a parallel with the Land Art artists. Michel Gérard has expressed this fantasy ‘of fitting steel corners into a volcanic fracture of the earth’s crust’. Entaille nouée, in its ‘brutality’, can be seen as ‘magma rising within the earth’.
Olivier Goetz