These sculptures are nothing less than a mirror held up to the subject, reflected in its most favourable light : surface, grain, warmth and tenderness in supple, fluid and suave matter. The name – signifying both sweet and soft and French – is indicative of the ambiguity that binds the corporeal to the material nature of things, described in its sweet/softness with the same words we would use for a person’s body : caress, breathe, embrace. No doubt we find the indelible trace of our earliest sensations, our body enveloped by the mother, at once caressing and caressed… the incarnation – the term is apt – of the plenitude of paradise lost. Perhaps we experience this primal well-being though transitional objects that are an extension of the security blanket we constantly carried as a child, objects that may be an item of clothing, a sheet, a comforter.
This type of sensation, labelled “erotic” since the advent of Freud, is not under tension nor suffused with desire ; nor does it exist in a temporal context, on the contrary. The sensation is a caress, without beginning or end. A caress much like that of a lake that bears you weightless; nothing else matters.
If the viewer receives some of this happy feeling, it is not because I have carved out its delicate path : I make my mark, the wood yields its own, and the viewer provides the entirety of the sensation, as a personal experience imprinted timelessly in the corporeal memory. Some things are “known” : consistency, texture, scent, but some things are not perceived by the senses. You remember and you recognise the blanket you are looking at because it is your own.