Patrick Lamouroux spent his childhood in his grandfather’s small craft boiler-making workshop and he still has the smells and sounds of working with iron imprinted on him.
But it was in the martial arts and contemporary dance that he first turned. He became aware of the presence of the body, its tensions and movement. After many years of practice, in search of a new artistic expression, Patrick Lamouroux naturally turned to metal sculpture. From then on, he never stopped trying to find the balance and dynamics of volumes and bodies.
“As a dancer, I am very interested in movement frozen in time. Movement at zero speed…. The speed is gone, but what remains in the bodies are the tensions and energies that suggest life… This is what I explore in my work as a sculptor”.
“ Les Âmes Eparses “ (*)
Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who fought at Verdun, Patrick Lamouroux travelled through this land of battle a few years ago. The fields and forests that were the scene of the Great War are still dotted with the tangible traces of the fighting, “These shreds of memory of a past reduced to rubble….”. This was a revelation for him, and the start of a memorial and alchemical project to transmute these materials into free, moving characters.
He began a patient process of collecting, cleaning and sorting. Pieces of tortured steel, fragments of laminated war machinery, shrapnel, shreds of mines, deformed scraps of metal… He is going to give each of these pieces a new destiny by giving them substance and a new humanity.
(*) The Scattered Souls
Captured in movement, his almost mineral figures reveal, through their shadows, a true grandeur, a fundamental energy. A singular impulse…. Like a sudden burst of life….
“I can’t forget that perhaps this shrapnel took the life of a soldier, I can’t consider it as an ordinary material and I’m obliged to think of it as a historical relic, a kind of fossil that I have to respect. I try to ensure that my work as a sculptor is worthy of this material…
I don’t want my figures to simply evoke suffering and pain. On the contrary, I want to give them a zest for life… Something on the order of elevation. I want them to have the last word on death…”.
