Sans titre (Labour Bleu)

Didier Marcel's work questions our relationship with the landscape, and the way we transform it, model it and look at it. His sculptures seem like riddles: ones that are often impossible to decipher. In a way, they reproduce the unresolved mystery of nature. The "Labours" ("ploughed fields") verticalise the earth, turning this mundane substance into a picture. This movement can also be seen as that of a metamorphosis changing nature into culture. The arbitrary colouring of the subject takes away its original realism. While the "Labours" evoke the work of sculpture, here the one brought about by the plough, they continually evoke memories of other paintings, too, echoing the "Texturologies" of Jean Dubuffet and the late works of Georges Braque.