christian renonciat

Cardboards

Works

 

Cardboard is fascinating. As cats, children and the homeless have long known : cardboard is a true mirror to the human body, reflecting back heat, intact ; it has the softness of the old paper it is made from, and the tender warm colour of light wood.

That is not all, these properties, allied with miraculous strength, are the result of the successful marriage of matter and geometry : paper and undulation (sinuosity). It is therefore a unique material, the pure product of human genius, half idea and half physical matter. Industry has used it to our advantage in all its subtleties, choosing different types of paper for each layer of cardboard (soft inside, tough outside, etc.), varying the amplitudes on the corrugated waves of paper in superposition so that no weakness is created through identical repetition.

Deep inside, I delight, I loose myself in the subtlety that I discover as I transcribe it, that I understand as I pick it apart. When time stands still for a moment, and as I slide out of all reference to scale, lost in a fragment of cardboard, it sometimes happens, in those magical moments in the studio (inspired by music as well), that I embark on a Lewis Carroll-like journey. Cardboard is then like a tiny Chinese lacquer piece: you hold it in the palm of your hand, but it contains all the parts of the world: a mountain, a heron, a waterfall, a philosopher…

Cardboard has many ways of resisting rips, of giving in when necessary, of healing up wounds, of singing in its undulations, as if in tune to the contemporary musical score it resembles.

Cardboard is a world where we can all find ourselves.