Artist Statement
Art to me is a balance of unanswerable questions and pointless fun, from it's origins on the walls of a cave to what ever the fuck it is now, I make sculpture because it excites me ! Using different materials to tell the world what I think and feel, with my philosophies, ideas and dreams.
" You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation, ” Plato. “play” in the majority of adults is as extinct as the white rhinoceros. The value of “fun” is slowly leaving our society. I investigate interaction as a way of breaking this barrier of “this is an art work don't touch it” and make sculptures that make you feel something real. I encourage the viewers to interact, engage and respond physically to the work, and through their actions invoke others. Fellow Artist Ralph Roosen said " maybe that is the metaphor, we do all these pointless tasks in life but what’s the point,”
My current project started January 2020 and with the difficulty of being a sculptor in the pandemic I questioned why I make art at all. "Sculpture is in crisis" Sacha Craddock stated in a recent podcast "what is sculpture good for" but two years on the same project, surviving Covid 19, I believe sculpture has its place in the world today. I took this negative energy and put it into a new material otherwise unexplored in sculpture. I intend to show the Coral Stone pieces made during the pandemic in Barbados early 2022. I never gave up on these works and I'm excited to show them. The world will never be the same from this shit show but my questions are : what do we value? what do we add? what do we take away? I believe this in life, in sculpture and in cultural tradition.
GianPiero Franchi