| Summary, etc. |
Philippe Droguet's works, at first glance attractive, organic and for some carnal, turn out to be strange or even menacing. The forms he creates fall within the registers of painting and sculpture. The artist draws on the constant parameters of sculpture, an art that is both visual and tactile, optical and haptic, which we know is embodied by the material, the volume and the way of occupying space, as much as by the surface, the epidermis that captures the light. The artist chooses his materials for example for what they operate in the work, the project he formulates for it. The list is long, disparate and potentially infinite but it makes up all the richness of the textures and the strangeness of the forms: screws, wallpaper seeds, bathtubs, birdhouses, gas canisters, socks, toothpicks, but also animal bones, highway paint or gunpowder for hunting cartridges. Paraffin freezes a sheet in folds, the upholsterer's seed, instead of being planted, adheres to the surface and presents its acrid points as a peel, the bark of the tree, skin among skins, sees itself protected by a layer of paraffin delicately brushed on. Droguet plays with volume, surface and material to incessantly explore the visibility and latency of things. His works thus settle on the thread between perception and consciousness, image and real body, that of the subject and that of the object; the work constantly oscillates between seduction and tragedy, a thin veil separating them, what the artist calls the "integument", that is to say the membrane, the skin, the surface, that which envelops and protects, that which covers and conceals, that which attracts and deceives, that which is displayed and simultaneously hidden from view. |