SubTiziano
Alexander Ponomarev

Russian submarine, painting, 22 meters

Deposit of the artist in 2011

Born in 1957 in Dniepropetrovsk, in Russia, Alexander Ponomarev lives and works in Moscow.

After showing it first on the Grand Canal during Venice Biennale 2009, Alexander Ponomarev chose to display in the waters of Vassivière Island its most emblematic work, the submarine SubTiziano. he travel process at the base of this realization is not stopped but find a place to anchor in Vassivière.

Alexander Ponomarev appropriates a military object – one that is dangerous and sly, one that became one of the most secretive and terrible weapons of our times. He makes its periscopes, radars and antennas useless for espionage, puts them in motion, thus creating a rather cheerful and festive atmosphere. The artist takes up Leonardo da Vinci's invention in an homage to the Renaissance man who was at the same time artist, scientist and writer; but he withdraws its main characteristic: secrecy and invisibility.

Painted with vivid colours and named SubTiziano, this work is also an echo to another artist who fascinates Ponomarev: the 16th century painter Tiziano.

Alexander Ponomarev graduated from the USSR Nautical Engineering College in 1979; he then worked several years in the Russian Navy before concentrating on art full time. His works have been exhibited at Moscow Biennale 2005 and 2007, and at Venice Biennale 2007 and 2011. He is one of the major artists on the contemporary Russian art scene.

Emerging from the waters of Vassivière Lake, the submarine SubTiziano first seems like an apparition, like a mirage. But his disturbing presence is real. It looks like it is watching and protecting a territory that has been dedicated to artists for more than 20 years. Between land and lake, it is patrolling in a zone of artistic activity, becoming one of its signals. It proves that contemporary creation can appear everywhere, extend its territory and happen in the most unseemly and unexpected places to assure the power of art.

Copyright : Vladimir Sichov

Model for Hospitality, i.e. Exclusion
Etienne Chambaud
2010

Concrete, 1 m x 1 m x 50 cm

Command of the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière in 2010

Born in 1980, Etienne Chambaud lives and works in Paris, France.

In the meadow, just in front of the Art Center, Etienne Chambaud has chosen to partially buried in the ground a dead-weight made of concrete. For his exhibition in Vassivière, taut steel cable was attached to dead-weight and lead to the top of the lighthouse where a cable went through a window and hung down vertically inside dated from the oblique to the top of the lighthouse, was entering through a window - which hung a steel mobile, Model for Hospitality, i.e. Exclusion.

Now in the collection of the wood of sculptures, the dead-weight, became an enigmatic object left by the artist, works as a palimpsest that keeps the track of a previous work. This artwork is part of the reflexion that the artist takes on the nature of the work of art, on its relationships with other artworks, on the contexts and reasons of the appearance of objects, on how they are used and full them of meaning or a particular story.

For Etienne Chambaud, Model for Hospitality, i.e. Exclusion becomes a relic, an object "redeemed" of functionality that today marks the separation between architecture and landscape.

Courtesy: Aurélien Mole

Forest untitled
Nico Vascellari

Trees, tape recorders, amplifier, magnetic tape

Command of the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière in 2010

Nico Vascellari lives and works in Vittorio Veneto, Italy where he was born in 1976.

Nico Vascellari was invited by Marcello Smarelli to design an art intervention in the framework of the ARTools project for the sculptures wood of Vassivière island.

The island forest proved to be an environment particularly well-suited to Nico Vascellari's artistic approach.

The work he is presenting is made up of an element linked conceptually by the idea of memory, the archive, and the metamorphosis of sedimented data.

Two tape recorders play a long loop of amplified sound, made up of a single magnetic tape of 100 meters obtained by joining together all the albums with a forest on the cover and which are part of the collection of the artist. The tape winds its way through the forest surrounding the Art Center, travelling up the trunks of the trees, with one of the tape recorders on REC and the other on  PLAY.

The device was designed in such a way that the sound traces are never completely erased. The tape continues recording what is going on outside, in the natural world, and adds the sounds of the Vassivière forest to the original soundtrack. Over time, the original sound traces will be lost, but not before they have been overlaid with other sounds, in successive strata, as though the tape were the living memory of some geological upheaval.

The pre-recorded sound loop will be constantly changing, and with time the sound traces of the audio cassettes will give way to a spontaneously created new soundtrack, dictated by chance.

Nico Vascellari's background is in the underground music scene, where he was front man on the noise band "With Love", an experiment he returned to in his project Lago Morto (Dead Lake), created for the Graz Kunsthalle in 2009. His work combines elements from underground culture and from the visual arts; he uses a range of media - photography, video and sculpture -, while performance holds the key to his work. Many different elements are employed in his art, including fabrics, objects in daily use or consecrated by tradition, lighting effects and new generation technology.

Courtesy: Aurélien Mole

OTRO
Koo Jeong A
2008-2012

Work commissioned in 2009 by the Limousin Regional Council with the support of the ministry of Culture and Communications in the framework of the state commission programme

Born in 1967 in Séoul in Corée du sud , Koo Jeong A lives and works everywhere.

OTRO is a skatable sculpture, composed of different bowls, a cradle and three tunnels. Koo Jeong A invites novices and experts to share the physical and sensorial experience of her work by "skating the landscape".

At the time of her arrival in 2007 for her exhibition called Oussseux, Koo Jeong A had been impressed by the mysterious winter landscapes of the island and the atmosphere that arose from it : Vassivière became Oussseux, an unreal, phantasmagoric and powerful dreamscape belonging to the imaginary world of the artist.

The concept of OTRO, its ovoid shape, the use of green phosphorescent concrete, its progressive discovery, and its integration in the island meadow make this artwork become an infinite land of investigation, that reflects all details like the light, its link with the site, the atmospheres, the dream and the fantastical. OTRO is an artwork made of bumps – the cradle – and hollows – bowls and tunnels. This work of Koo Jeong-A refers to both definitions of sculpture and representation: hollows and bumps, shadows and lights, soft or accentuated reliefs.

It is an art work to experiment, not only from a sporting point of view but also from a sensorial, sensitive and artistic point of view. It establishes the link between the urban, practicable, sporting and playful aspect of the artwork as a skate park and the artwork from an artistic point of view as part of Koo Jeong A’s world.

OTRO is a specific process that federated around the project the group of skaters Brusk, Barricade and agency l'Escaut architectures for the overall coordination and technical design.

Copyright: Koo Jeong A, L'Escaut Architecture

Niki Quester
Oscar Tuazon

Tree, marble slab 200 x 90 x 10 cm, 450 kg

Command of the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière in 2009

Born in 1975 in Seattle, USA, Oscar Tuazon lives and works in Paris, France.

In the wood of sculptures of Vassivière island, Oscar Tuazon confront the vegetal element to the mineral: an oak and a marble slab compete in a tension dictated by gravity and the very power of the elements. The contrast between the marble, which traditionally refers to the commemorative statuary and funerary art and the tree, a sign of vitality and strength, highlights the ability of plants to adapt to their environments to avoid extinction.

The work - which the artist gave the name of Niki Quester tribute to a person of his childhood who had initiated to pay attention, detail - becomes an experience of gaze that can find an outcome just by walking and the careful observation of visitors to its environment.

Copyright: François Doury

(Still life) 2001-2009
Serge Spitzer

Uniques tennis balls, variables dimensions

Deposit of the artist (owner the artist) in 2009

Born in Bucharest in Romania in 1951, Serge Spitzer lives and works in New York in the United States.

A protagonist of the artistic revolution of the late 60s, he began to develop a production of concepts based on “models of reality”. The play of tensions between visibility and invisibility, order and chaos, weight and fragile floating, statics and movement is a recurrent theme in Spitzer’s work, which includes references to multiple forms of social and political functionings. He combines artistic conventions with biological, technological or social systems to question the processes of communication, perception and awakening of conscience.

His works, shown in the most prestigious institutions and manifestations, are linked to their sites, such as Re/Cycle (Don’t Hold Your Breath) to the Venice Biennial, Re/Search (Alchemy and/or Question Marks with Swiss Air) to the Kunstmuseum in Bern, as well as his presence today in Istanbul with Molecular (ISTANBUL).

The ephemeral project Still life on Vassivière Island, composed of tens of thousands of unique tennis balls in an area measuring a few hectares, is not a simple composition of static objects, as its title may ironically suggest. Fascinated by the multiplicities of typical landscapes, Serge Spitzer chose to terminate the cycle of creation of this highly enigmatic installation in the sculpture wood of Vassivière Island on the heights of the Deleuzean Plateau de Millevaches after having travelled in the “American BACKYARD” of the gardens of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art at Ridgefield in 2008 and at the “Swiss ALPS” at Zuoz in 2009.

The work is a demonstration of an imperceptible "reality model" which propagates like a virus and presents itself as a physical metaphor of the way that art interacts with everyday life. As in numerous “viral sculptures” conceived since the 90s, the ephemeral structure that Serge Spitzer has installed in the Island meadow is transformed over time by uncontrolled and accidental forces: the balls will be swept away by wind, storm and rain, or else knocked out of place by visitors; now and again, children will be tempted to play or just take one; and the grass will grow slowly to recover the original. 

Serge Spitzer has engaged in the design and the manufacturing process of this work to ensure the unique and at the same time ephemeral nature of each ball without any concern to preserve the work. So, on each used ball has been printed the image of a tiny detail of a piece of lawn photographed by the artist and then blown up to arrive at this pixelated green, a near-perfect mimetism of the places where they were implanted up to now.

Despite its very minimalist formal execution, Serge Spitzer’s project is entirely built around the imperfection of reality, with social and political overtones. His work takes possession of the surroundings with objects that imply at one and the same time notions of leisure, play and military occupation.

In the tradition of those artists who have used landscape as a vehicle for contemplation, Still life becomes a field for thinking.

Copyright : Jean-Baptiste Decavèle  

Sternschnuppe
Michael Sailstorfer

Mercedes Benz, street lamp, elastic cable, metal 200 x 450 x 500 cm

Deposit of My Private Milan (owner My Private Milan) in 2009

Born in 1979 in Germany Vilsbiburg, Michael Sailstorfer lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Transformations, adjustments contextual spatial appropriation, Michael Sailstorfer's work is quickly identified by his interest in daily objects, the materials around us, his fascination with identity and the specific history of these objects and their own destiny. He deasls with these things, breaking them up, separating them, deforming them, adapting them to gather them again, moving them, reinterpreting them and re-qualifying them. Such a distortion of the meaning of the object and parallel use of its formal qualities does not produce its destruction, the aim is rather to reconfigure and change its meaning. Two works by the german artist are presented in the wood of sculptures of Vassivière island. Placed in very different parts of the island - in the forest, near the lake, in the meadow - these works emphasize the artificiality of Vassivière island and his artistic vocation.

What makes Sailstorfer’s work so extraordinary is the ardent desire of its realization and the melancholy in which it is produced and tragedy aware of his destiny. Sternschnuppe (Shooting star) is one of the most important works of his career, for his extreme poetry, the power of the concept, the comic sense of its realization and the tragic note of its outcome. The artist presents himself initially as a dreamer, who no longer wish to be submitted to a mysterious entity when he desires to see a shooting star in the sky. It is a romantic desire to produce a natural phenomenon filled of emotions.

Whether true or not, the artist admits to have done this work for his girlfriend for who he wanted to send up shooting stars. The Mercedes W123 with a catapult for streetlights and directly built in front of the Centre international d'art et du paysage, welcomes visitors with humor, noting the entrance into an artistic territory, a place of curiosity and imagination.

Copyright: François Doury

The Unicorn of Vassivière ("Unicorn Eiffel")
Yona Friedman

Marne in bulk not dried, 324 m 

Command publique du Ministère de la culture et de la communication for the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap (owner Cnap/Fnac) in 2009 

Deposit of the architect and the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap in 2009

Born in 1923 in Budapest, Yona Friedman lives and works in Paris.

For Vassivière, Yona Friedman has created for his exhibition Etc. Balkis Island with Jean-Baptiste Decavèle presented from the 5th July to 1st December 2009, The Unicorn of Vassivière ("Unicorn Eiffel"), an ephemeral sculptures that takes up the whole area in front of the Art Center, drawn on the ground with a mineral substance (carbonate) and completely visible from the top of the lighthouse built by Aldo Rossi to dominate the island. the silhouette of the dog Balkis playing at some distance from the Unicorn was made by plannung Sarrasin wheat grains.

The reference to Incan civilization is explicit, with the imagination carried through the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figuration surrounded by a maze of geometric shapes like those still seen in the South of the high plateaus at Naszca.

Copyright: Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, Yona Friedman, Les voyages extraordinaires (le voyage à la licorne spatiale), 2009

Balkis
Yona Friedman

Drawing ground track with buckwheat, 36 m

Deposit of the architect in 2009

Born in 1923 in Budapest, Hungary, Yona Friedman lives and works in Paris, France.

For Vassivière island, Yona Friedman created alongside the mineral Unicorn Eiffel, another land sculpture, this one here plant, which occupies the meadow behind the Art Center. It is Balkis. Tribute to his inseparable dog, now dead but embodies a unique and exceptional educational breath, protagonist of several books and theoretical works (Vous avez un chien. C'est lui qui vous a choisi, L’ordre compliqué et autres fragments).

These two figures of animals, visible bestiary of the sky as Earth, transfigure the meadows of Vassivière by their monumental presence and mysterious.

Balkis appears schematically appears in buckwheat, playing from far with Unicorn Eiffel.

In this drawing in buckwheat, the visitor finds the characteristic trait of Yona Friedman’s cartoons created over 40 years to explain their social, urban and architecture models.

Buckwheat named "100-day plant" has been chosen by the nature of its culture that spreads over three months from June to the end of August - the sculpture has been created for the exhibition Etc. Balkis Island presented at the Art Center during the summer 2009. Once widely cultivated in areas with poor acid soils, in Central Europe, Russia, North America and in France (Bretagne, Normandie, Limousin, Auvergne, Pyrénées...), buckwheat is now a plant whose culture keep disappearing in France.

Copyright: Frédéric Legros

Untitled
Victor Man
2009

Tree, animal furs, wire

Deposit of the artist in 2009

Born in 1974, Victor Man lives and works in Cluj, Romania.

Victor Man appears as one of the most interesting artists on the emerging scene of Eastern Europe. His work has been presented in the Romanian Pavilion in Venice Biennial in 2007, his international reputation keeps increasing. Using painting, sculpture, mural painting or screen printing, he creates installations in which intertwine the individual and collective memory, the themes of eroticism, power and desire.

As part of his solo exhibition presented at the Centre international d’art et du paysage in 2009, Victor Man conceives a sculpture project which materializes in the forest by a young tree covered with numerous animal furs. Over the seasons, experiencing the harsh climate and hostile of the island, furs will waterlogge, freeze, dry out and eventually will fall. By its mysterious presence in the wood of sculptures, the work appears more as a discrete inscription dragging Vassivière island in an area of consciousness and meditation, a place of profound melancholy.

Copyright: André Morin

Conductor
Kris Martin
2006

Wooden rod 31 cm, young tree

Deposit of My Private Milan (owner My Private Milan) in 2009

Born in 1972 in Kortrijk, Belgium, Kris Martin lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

The experience of time and the desire of understanding it in order to overtake it is a central element of Kris Martin’s work. The presence of his productions pushes the viewer to question his own position in relation not only at work but also in relation to the wider framework of its existence.

Presented in the exhibition MY PRIVATE escaped from Italy in 2006, Conductor by Kris Martin joins in a sustainable manner the place he had originally chosen in the wood of sculptures of Vassivière island at the entrance of the Art Center, near the Aldo Rossi’s lighthouse, creating a new border between architecture and nature.

Conductor is a thin rod of conductor, attached to a branch of a young tree, which moves in the wind and rises gradually at the rate of growth of the tree. For the artist, the first tree in the forest heads the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière.

Copyright: André Morin

The three inflatable modules at Vassivière Island
Hans Walter Müller
2007

PVC, plastic sheet, 400 x 528 cm 

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 2007

Born in Worm in Germany in 1935, Hans Walter Müller lives and works in La Ferté–Alais in France. 

An engineer and architect from the Polytechnic School in Darmstadt in Germany, Hans Walter Müller pursued his studies in Paris and engaged in architectural studies with the material of his time: artificial light, projected image, sound, plastic, electric motors, all at the service of the “architecture of movement”. He belonged to the kinetic art movement, whose spirit he prolonged and opened to new fields of experience applied to architecture, which have now become the “architecture of air”.

The three inflatable modules conceived for the Centre international d’art et du paysage of Vassivière Island under the auspices of a public commission of the Ministry of Culture and Communications, subscribe to the cultural policy of the Art Center. The idea is to create a new type of equipment that is both a work of architect an d a mobile pedagogic tool designed to be transported, installed and practiced as a play space for discove ry and a meeting place, in keeping with the notion of a “pavilion-garden”. 

The conception of an architecture of air, light and nomadic, its ability to be used principally as a teaching tool, its easy and playful installation on a converted platform which is in itself functional and ecological, are the bases of this project. In the sculpture park, Hans Walter Müller’s three modules offer different architectural particularities in respect to the different geographical sites: the forest, the lake and Aldo Rossi’s architecture.

Copyright: Marc Domage

The three inflatable modules at Vassivière Island
Hans Walter Müller
2007

PVC, plastic cloth, wooden platform, engine, 400 x 528 cm in diameter

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 2007

Born 1935 in Worm (Germany), Hans Wlater Müller lives and works in La Ferté-Alais.

Hans Walter Müller's inflatable structures can be grasped in many fashion : playful, ephemeral, memories of a nomadic time... All of this is true but this process encompasses real questions towards architectur e and its many uses. This modules are also providing real solutions to chosen way of lives. The pair of creators, Marie-France Vesperini and Hans Walter Müller are for twenty years embarked in the great adventure of living under, inside, with an inflatable habitat serving many functions (protective skin as well as screening surface). They have been entrusted with the mission of bringing back to life this fascinating page of the history of architecture that is telling about the party, about nomadism and about a new way of considering our relationship with nature and our environment. 

Copyright: Marc Domage

The three inflatable modules at Vassivière Island
Hans-Walter Müller
2007

PVC, plastic cloth, wooden platform, engine, 400 x 528 cm in diameter

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 2007

Born 1935 in Worm (Germany), Hans-Wlater Müller lives and works in La Ferté-Alais.

Hans-Walter Müller is the true inventor of the "inflatables", those inhabitable air architectures. For more than 30 years, Hans-Walter Müller, artist that belonged to the 60's cinetic art movement, is developing a nomadic, ephemeral, light and easy to use architecture. In 1971, the architect settles in one of this inflatables on the grounds of the Cerny airfield in the Ferté-Alais forest (Essonne). Amidst the trees, surrounded by ponds filled with aquatic plants and rare fishes, the yellow bubble shelters workshops, work and recreational area that are laid out on sliding planking. Underground, carved in the rock, are the domestic and rest areas which are opening on the outside (terraces, picture windows).

"An inflatable, explains Hans-Walter Müller, is simply a skin containing a space, separating the outside from the inside, appearing and disappearing and sometimes dematerializing. In this its a playful, fantastic and unusual space, very far from the traditional building techniques".  

Copyright: Marc Domage

Prairie fleurie
Gilles Clément
2007

Various plants, variable size

Commande of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de de Vassivière") in 2003

Born 1943 in Argenton-sur-Creuse, Gilles Clément works and lives in Crozan in Creuse in France and in Paris in France.

Gilles Clément, horticultural engineer, landscape artist, writer, gardener, teaches at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage at Versailles. Apart from his activities as creator of parks, gardens, both public and private spaces, he's currently engaged in theoretical and practical research along three main axis : the Jardin en mouvement (moving garden), a concept born from the practice of his own garden in Creuse, the Jardin planétaire (planetary garden), political project for a humanistic ecology, the Tiers-Paysage (Third-Landscape), a concept born from analysis on Limousin's landscapes.In 2003, Gilles Clément, proposes, following a commission from the Syndicat "le lac de Vassivière", a landscape planning document for Vassivière prompting the cration of various gardens around the lake and on the island. the island is perceived by the landscape artist as a group of "interdependent spaces", as in a place where one goes from one ambiance to the next : building vicinity, in bloom meadows, shaded woods ...Gilles Clément's landscape charter underlines the diversity of this ensemble removed from the farming areas (diversity of species, landscapes, "gardens"). Considering the lake as the landscape's theatrical background, from any point of view possible, Clément must integrate it as a major asset of the landscape while taking into account its summertime use. This project, the one of its kind in Europe, aims to maintain or improve the components of the ecological balance, as the only way to solve harmoniously and cost-effectively the aesthetic components. With this approach, landscape are environment are intimately linked.The charter specifies a series of management recommendations on particular topics like farming and forest management, the care and valorization of noticeable natural sites ... ; the detailed charter presenting a series of development projects for the site.

The Syndicat "le lac de Vassivière" chooses as a first implementation of the charter, the creation of a blooming meadow on the south side of the island allowing the enhancement of an undeveloped part of the island though very visible from the beach and the point of view of Auphelle. A square shaped plot of land (2500 m2) was then implanted to increase visibility. Another plot (1100 m2) was planted nearby on a location with an interesting visual impact (vicinity to the footpath, slope, visibility from the castle's square).

Copyright: Syndicat "le Lac de Vassivière"

Untitled
Marco Boggio Sella

Iron, 210 x 364 x 304cm

Deposit of the artist (owner artist) in 2007

Born in Turin in Italy in 1972, Marco Boggio Sella works in New York in United States.

Marco Boggio Sella’s formal process springs from a reflection on the visual and psychological impact of the work of art on the spectator and the interpretation that the spectator makes of it.

Untitled (2003), representing a German helmet which is both monumental and rusty, functions as a metaphor for the weight of History, still deeply anchored in our minds. The act of reproducing this emblematic object in a hyper-realistic and over-dimensioned manner transforms it into a representation of the concept itself.

What at first glance reminds us of a painful and violent image of our contemporary society is revealed as a troubling vehicle of memory. The rust that covers the object, associated with its relic nature, annuls all doubts as to the possibility of a commemorative reading of this sculpture. 

In placing this work on Vassivière Island, on land that resisted the Nazi invaders, the artist wanted to reactivate our duty to remember by echoing the ever-living memory of the local population. 

Marco Boggio Sella thus erected a rusted and abandoned representation of Nazism. Here the helmet, a relic of those dark times, stands imposing in all its volume, forcing us to a permanent confrontation with History.

Courtesy: Marc Domage

Waldputz
Michael Sailstorfer
2000-2004

2.5 x 4.8 x 4.8m

Deposit of My Private Milan (owner My Private Milan) in 2009

Born in Germany in 1979, Michael Sailstorfer lives and works in Berlin in Germany.

Michael Sailstorfer likes to take apart vehicles or objects, an activity that enables him to understand the interior of all sorts of constructions that surround him. But if he disassembles, it is above all for the purpose of rebuilding better and giving a new life to the original object. By means of this process of metamorphosis which is at the same time both work and play, he applies himself to creating a work that, equipped with a new name, sets a sto ry machine in motion.

Michael Sailstorfer refers consciously to artistic strategies of past generations and uses them to unmask the tragedy of their seriousness.

Waldputz’s radical conquest of artistic space in nature becomes a piece of forest that is carefully cleaned by hand. An artistic strategy easily reminiscent of Richard Long or Michael Heizer, yet – given the vain and absurd character of the task – the meticulous way in which it is produced, and the transitory nature of the result, represent an ardent, Utopian and finally tragic desire.

Faced with works of this sort that are sensitive and extremely pragmatic in terms of construction, but at the same time absurd, one perceives at once the poetry, desire, euphoria and irony of the production, and the melancholy of its achievement.

Copyright: André Morin

Grains of light
Erik Samakh
2003

Variable technics and dimensions

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 2003

Born in Saint Georges de Didonne in 1959, Erik Samakh lives and works in Serres in the Haute-Provence Alps.

Erik Samakh’s thought is the opposite of any desire for enshrinement that excludes human presence from protected nature. He is interested in modes of behavior and communications, in the relation between things rather than the things themselves, including in this process all living things, which also includes the public. For him, in no case does the relation to nature take the form of romantic isolation and a retreat from the social field.

The installation of Grains of Lights took place at the same time as The Tijuca Dreams, after the storm. As much at ease with nature as with technology, Erik Samakh produces a work among the trees on the Island, an autonomous work comprised of three hundred and fifty Grains of Lights that are charged during the day with solar energy before transforming at nightfall into a constellation of stars.

Copyright: Marc Domage

The Flute Players
Erik Samakh
2003

Aluminium and resin, solar collector, turbine and electronics, 70 X 10 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 2003

Born in Saint Georges de Didonne in France in 1959, Erik Samakh lives and works in Serres in the Haute-Provence Alps in France.

Erik Samakh’s thought is the opposite of any desire for enshrinement that excludes human presence from protected nature. He is interested in modes of behavior and communications, in the relation between things rather than the things themselves, including in this process all living things, which also includes the public. For him, in no case does the relation to nature take the form of romantic isolation and a retreat from the social field. 
 

For Vassivière, Erik Samakh conceived an installation of thirty solar flutes installed on a site of over 30 hectares. The sounds of The Flute Players are always quite short and have various tonalities, because each module, with the autonomous energy of its solar captor, breathes air into a unique-modeled flute. The source of solar energy introduces a modulation of intensities according to the rays of light. These two parameters contribute together to a permanent renewing of sound until the silence of night. This variation coincides with the milieu itself. Like so many animals, the flutes react to the alternates of day and night as well as to weather conditions. Erik Samakh mixes in his work his interest in nature and his interest in technology. He would like the interface with the user to be as direct as possible and for the spectator not to see the technological machines.

Copyright: Marc Domage

The Tijuca Dreams, after the storm
Erik Samakh
2003

Variable technics and dimensions

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 2003

Born in Saint Georges de Didonne in France in 1959, Erik Samakh lives and works in Serres in the Haute-Provence Alps in France.

Erik Samakh’s thought is the opposite of any desire for enshrinement that excludes human presence from protected nature. He is interested in modes of behavior and communications, in the relation between things rather than the things themselves, including in this process all living things, which also includes the public. For him, in no case does the relation to nature take the form of romantic isolation and a retreat from the social field. 
 

In early 2002, the Centre international d’art et du paysage invited Erik Samakh to take part in an exchange program among artists, landscape gardeners, architects and actors of local life (inhabitants, elected representatives, etc.) to produce in situ the replanting of 2,500 trees and bushes by the inhabitants of a region wasted by monoculture and storm. The Tijuca Dreams are a re-invention of garden art and lend us the opportunity to reflect on biodiversity, participative culture, the role of sound in the perception of space and development of territories.

Copyright: Marc Domage

Untitled, (to Paul Cézanne)
Olivier Mosset
2000

Concrete 50 x 230 x 63cm

Commande of the Centre d'art (owner Frac Limousin) in 2005

Born in Bern in Swiss in 1944, Olivier Mosset lives and works in Arizona in United States.

Ever since 1964, Olivier Mosset has found himself in the context of critical analysis of painting. The chosen shape, a black circle painted in the center of a square, becomes a signature for him before he starts to adopt monochromes, a practice that derives from seeing painting as an object. Settled since 1977 in the United States, there he pursues extremely coherent work painting around questions concerning signature, anonymity, appropriation and repetition.

Maillol’s famous sculpture, Hommage to Cézanne was commissioned in 1912 by a committee of artists from Aix-en-Provence. For Maillol, this classical composition of a statue of a clothed woman carrying an olive branch was the best way to evoke painting. The work was installed in the Tuileries Gardens, then removed to near the Louvre without its original pedestal and offered to the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris.

Strolling in the Tuileries Gardens, Olivier Mosset discovered the abandoned pedestal with the inscription "To Paul Cézanne". He had a copy of this stone made at Bienne.

Showed at the Centre international d’art et du paysage of Vassivière Island in 2004, he has presented this work which signs the landscape in unusual fashion, both by Paul Cézanne and by Olivier Mosset. 

Copyright: Jean-Denis Frater

Toilet on the Mountain
Ilya et Emilia Kabakov
2004

Wood, 210 x 160 x 180cm

Commande of the Centre d'art (owner artists) in 2004

Born respectively 1933 and 1945 in Russia, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov live and work in New York in United States.

Ilya Kabakov began his career as an artist as a painter and illustrator of children’s books. Since his debut in the 80s, he has dedicated himself to showing contemporary Russian everyday life through installations that travel all over the world.

Toilet on the mountain is a work conceived in 1999 and then presented in the Centre international d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière in 2004. This installation, placed on a high spot facing the lake, takes the form of provisional wooden toilets. In fact, if you approach the work in the direction of the lake, you will discover that there are two compartments, neither of which has doors. This is isolation vis-à-vis society: a folding over into oneself that brings both tranquility and a sense of solitude and offers a privileged panorama on the lake and its surroundings.

Copyright: Marc Domage

The House of Wool
Frédéric Ollereau
1997

Granite, wool and silk tapestry, 1 x 0.6 x 1m

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication helped by the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap (deposit of the Cnap/Fnac) in 1997

Born in Grenoble in 1962 in France, Frédéric Ollereau lives and works in Paris in France.

The House of Wool is made of two elements: a block of granite in the shape of a house on which is laid a wool and silk tapestry woven at the "Courant d’art" studio in Aubusson. The tapestry, representing on the six sides of the structure a human limb and installed outdoors, underwent consecutive degradations due to various periods of bad weather and deteriorated in the course of time. 

Each element of the work shows the artist’s proposal: “During the actual production, the tapestry can be perceived as the symbol of certain everyday preoccupations. Stitch after stitch, like so many pieces accomplished in solitude, this gesture can testify to the act of subsistence: it forms a whole, a protecting envelope. […] The House of Wool in the size of a body bent upon itself in a position of defense offers refuge against everydayness and seals in closed spaces. Without any tearing or bursting out, the body constrained by reduced space – which is both protecting and jailing – returns to an opaque and clandestine reality. Anonymous again.The House of Wool is the result of a specific reflection on the identity of the individual in urban social space.

The House of Wool, abandoned like graffiti, will let erosion take care of removing little by little all traces of its passage in this place. The work thus renews the use of tapestry, a medium usually attached to the idea of permanence. Tapestry that generally decorates interiors now finds itself outdoors; the skeleton becomes a skin, then disappears to allow another skeleton to appear, one in stone structure. The long weaving work comes undone through time; the house blends into nature. The skeleton is dislocated, like a broken puppet come all unhinged with progressive use. The loss of the work is uncontrollable, the spending irremediable.

Copyright: Jacques Hoepffner

Untitled
Jacques Julien
1997-2000

Iron, pvc, 210 x 360 x 280cm

Commande of the Centre d'art (owner Ciap) in 2000

Born in Lons-le Saunier in France in 1967, Jacques Julien lives and works in Paris and Besançon in France.

Different sports activities (football, basketball, golf…) are the exclusive resource of Jacques Julien’s work. It is this monomania that lends his pieces the air of simplicity and familiarity, exhibiting a deliberately faded imagination. Jacques Julien plays on space metonymically: despite the obvious sculptural graciousness, the piece is not at all an object locked in its function or in its volume. 
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Heaped on the floor, cut into sections, three basketball baskets and their frames are exposed like bits of a puzzle in a spherical shape that is imperfect, voluminous and open. This work enables us to draw closer to Jacques Julien’s approach, which sees sport as representing a system made of laws and rules that the players must obey. Sports grounds, with their designs, dimensions, and peculiar topography are precisely there to remind us what these rules and tangible signs mean. In sports, then, the suggested system, the presupposed laws and rules, as well as the engagement that is required and the improvement that is demanded, may resemble the world we live in, a world that is structured, ruled and organized. Accordingly, by representing the world of sport in such a chaotic, de-structured, deformed and truncated way, Jacques Julien invites us to question our own world and how it functions.

Copyright:  Marc Domage

Exile
Adel Abdessemed
1996-2002

Blue neons, 26 x 11cm

Commande of the Centre d'art (owner Ciap) in 2002

Born in  Algeria in 1971, Adel Abdessemed lives and works in Berlin in Germany.

Adel Abdessemed’s work represents a form of political engagement/investment which stresses exile, resistance and subversion.

Comparing the contradictions of African and Western culture, the artist became interested in their taboos and the way to transcend them. He pursues another relentless quest: individual and collective identity. In Abdessemed’s work there is always a tension between the great poetry of the image and the violence of the idea that it represents. For war is ever present, even in the most idyllic of environments, which yields this notion of Exile, in the form of a blue neon presented above the entrance of the Art Center built by Aldo Rossi on Vassivière Island. < ;/span>

Adel Abdessemed chose the title “Exile” not only because he heard it so often when he arrived in France, but also because of the paradox that it holds: it means at the same time leaving and settling, here and there, the drama of the foreigner. The blue neon “Exile” explicitly unites “exile” and “exit” by playing on the ambiguity of its site.

Copyright: Marc Domage

Point of View
Bernard Pagès
1997

Rusty steel, metallic or painted, cut concrete, 565 x 31 x 300 cm

Commande of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1997

Born in Cahors in France in 1940, Bernard Pagès lives and works in Nice in France.

“This is a sculpture specially conceived for Vassivière. The sculpture spends its time swaying its hips. Its splits are the antithesis of the stability of the lighthouse. Its indentations and projections contradict one another and in their opposition correct themselves. It is built in a succession of returns and inversions. The heaviest and densest part in colored concrete stands high, supported by fine entwinements of metal, all the frailer for being dangerously twisted. It is as if it had been jostled and had partly sunk under the pressure. The metal flames that unroll at the top seem to be fleshier and therefore heavier than the slender bars at the base. Only this low section is metallic. The rust, instead of climbing, seems paradoxically to descend towards the ground. The acid-green bands that encircle the upper part recall the painted IPN lintels used in construction, and their oval shape recalls the small brick vaults around the tower. At the same time, this green highlights the fire of the rust and the acidity of the color of the concrete. But the point of view is always like searching for balance.” (Bernard Pagès)

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled (Piece for Hellerau)
Veit Stratmann

Painted metal tubes, 100 x 100 x 1000 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication helped by the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap (deposit of the Cnap/Fnac) in 1996

Born in Bochum in Germany in 1960, Veit Stratmann lives and works in Paris in France. 

For Veit Stratmann, the work of art is not something that is finished. The work remains unfinished because above all else it is a tool, an architectural mechanism, a game ...

Untitled (Piece for Hellerau) is a machine that invites the spectator to take a stance, to express a desire. It constitutes a materialization and a discussion of the concepts that gave rise to the place for which it was conceived (a building sheltering an old Soviet military installation in the Hellerau district in Dresden). The structure can be installed wherever the function corresponds to one or more points of the content that are put forward for discussion by the piece. The work is only considered entire to the extent that it is used by the spectator. 

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Vladimir Skoda
1996

Metal, 0,70m

Commande of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1996

Born in Prague in Czechoslovakia in 1942, Vladimir Skoda lives and works in Paris in France.

Vladimir Skoda came to study in France in 1968, when he abandoned painting in favor of sculpture in the studios of the National Higher School of Fine Arts of Paris in 1969. As of 1975, working in iron and steel enabled him to resolve the problem of representation; the energy of the body, in its rapport with the material, came to substitute it. Then forms derived from simple geometry appeared, enabling him to articulate what the material dictated to him, from the preliminary drawing to the project. The first “balls”, “spinning tops” or “pyramids” were the result. At Vassivière, Skoda’s work found an ideal place in the form of a circle close to a small wall.

, palatino;">“I like simple, elementary things. If I use geometric forms, it’s not because I am austere but because they are firm”, declares Skoda. Insisting on the capacity of resistance of his materials and forms, he goes on: “Metal can deform, change from one shape to another without losing anything. The irreducible mass of metal, the sphere that resists all points of view, and the firmness of geometry allow me to keep the physical presence of the work and to affirm it manifestly against the inconsistency of objects”.

Copyright: André Morin

Errors-exact
Anne Marie Jugnet
1994

White neon tubes hanging from trees in the forest 

Commande of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born in La Clayette in Saône et Loire in 1958 in France, Anne Marie Jugnet lives and works in Paris in France.

Installed in a dark forest of conifers, hanging among the trees, two words - “errors” and “exact” - are written in white neon. Small in size and guided by two spindles, they are visible and legible from the edge of the forest. The use of light, the specific choice of written words and the environment in which the work is situated are all features of Anne Marie Jugnet’s production. This work contains aspects of wandering and research, and does not reflect a single point of view. “Error” comes from the Latin errare: to wander, while “exact” comes from exigere: to conclude. (Anne Marie Jugnet, 1994)

Most of Anne Marie Jugnet’s works are composed of words or short phrases, and the artist seeks to communicate with the spectator through the use of writing. In his text "Writing the invisible”, Michel Bourel explains the artist’s process: “She extracts from the text-reservoir words and expressions that reinforce the essentially mysterious dimension of her work. She establishes an extremely allusive means of communication, far indeed from the research of advertising persuasion that sometimes borrows this language resource. […] The communicating aspect is stres sed, and even at the core of her work she cares for plastic dimensions with extreme attention, exploring - in what is manifest and what is invisible - the relation of those who have to see to read and read to see the work, and thus reach its meaning.”

Copyright:  André Morin

Casting
Roland Cognet
1993-1994

Sequoia, cement, 4 x 2.2m

Commande of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born in l’Allier in France in 1957, Roland Cognet lives and works in Jussat and Paris in France.

Roland Cognet is a sculptor in the traditional sense of the term. He uses simple, natural or industrial materials and creates elementary shapes often taken directly from a matrix of the material. 

Here organic or natural (the sequoia trunk) are placed parallel to the industrial, the fabricated (cement) by the casting technique. In this way the artist proposes a reflection on symmetry and duality which underlines the particular rapport between architect and the natural environment of the Art Center.

According to Roland Cognet, the question of the model is posed, and simple technical attitudes such as casting, modeling and direct carving are rich in meaning. For him, working directly with the tree offers proximity with the landscape. Roland Cognet realized that it was “natural” to find a bit of felled tree in this place (the Art Center is surrounded by woods), but his casting, simply placed alongside, was about to shake this perception and become, with the cutting of the tree, an imperceptible happening.

Copyright: André Morin

Island
Hervé Le Nost

Granite, steel, bronze, 150 x 150 x 15cm

Command of the Art Center (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born in Guingamp in 1957, Hervé Le Nost lives and works in Cast in France.

Hervé Le Nost’s work is entirely dedicated to liquid, to fluidity. Following the exhibit “Island, earth, water, sky” presented at the Art Center in 1994, the artist installed a series of forms representing Vassivière Island in different materials (bronze, steel, granite, skin, porcelain and electric light) that are displayed in the exhibit space on the ground and on the wall. The presence of each material is justified either in the history of the site or by its color.

Later on he chose to reinstall two of his sculptures, (in steel and in granite), one in the park, above a fishing area on which floats another bronze form representing the Island in reduced dimensions. The fishing area is witness to a process of deterioration of this irregular and insular form, with each particular material being exposed in order to memorize and qualify a succession of periods before and after this earth was isolated by the waters (from the stone age to the post-modern period).

As a result of the building of a dam, Vassivière Island is artificial and consequently an entirely separate artifact. Water gave it its shape, sculpted it. In this double game of representation and reality – where nature stops and culture begins – the place for exhibition becomes the piece itself. Since all art is artifice, the Island becomes a metaphor for a reflection on the nature of art. 

Copyright: André Morin

Sign Art
Michelangelo Pistoletto
1993-1994

Seven Volvic lava stones placed at crossings, 10 x 210 x 120 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born in 1933 in Biella in Italy, Michelangelo Pistoletto still lives and works there. 

“The work consists in seven sculptures in Volvic lava stone installed horizontally on the ground, that is to say, buried their full thickness so that they are flush and can be stood on and trodden … Each element is laid out at the crossing of two or more paths, following a ring movement that develops inside the wooded slope of the Island, along the route usually taken by visitors. The project is called Il Segno Arte (Sign Art), for which I defined a form to identify the concept of “art”. The references of this sign in its physical and material existence are multiple in the very image of art that can reveal and condense opposite terms: division-union, closure-overture, conjunction-separation, surface-perspective, design-material, concept-object, implosion-explosion, laceration-holding, static-dynamic, like the butterfly born of metamorphosis, so weight-lightness. Il Segno Arte is situated at the crossroads to accentuate the feeling of structural holding in the focal points that join together the different directions: arrival and departure, divergence and choice, possibility and decision. This work does not rise vertically like a traditional monument, but lies horizontally on the ground to assume the fluid dimension of time. The work is fertile the whole length of its trajectory, not in just one point, so it is not at all invasive. It expresses the color of the elements like natural erosion and the slow degradation that results from the ritual, continuous passage of visitors. This is horizontality as time sliding.

 Il Segno Arte is part of an idea that I showed in 1976 with the book A Hundred Exhibits (…). Carrying out the project at Vassivière is its durable testimony.” (Michelangelo Pistoletto)

Copyright: Jacques Hoepffner

Sign Art
Michelangelo Pistoletto
1993-1994

Seven stones in Volvic lava placed at crossroads, 10 x 210 x 120 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born 1933 in Biella in Italy, where Michelangelo Pistoletto lives and works.

Through works that are significant of his creative process since the sixties, Michelangelo Pistoletto recounts with the Segno Arte the root of his global concept regarding art and its extension toward social and political issues. Quest for personal identity as well as a strong commitment in the artistic utopias in recent years, those visual proposals are viewed as means of social mutation.

Copyright: André Morin

Sign Art
Michelangelo Pistoletto
1993-1994

Seven stones in Volvic lava placed at crossroads, 10 x 210 x 120 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born 1933 in Biella in Italy, where Michelangelo Pistoletto lives and works.

Pistoletto's work, in adequacy with the purpose of Cittadellarte, was to choose a symbol, Segno Arte, the Art Sign, applied to any everyday life object possible : tables, canopy bed, window, radiator, door ... and for Vassivière island a slab all the more symbolic for the slab is a vector of "transition", as this sign is a clue of the fusion of art with life.

If the path of the Segno Arte, between dreams and realities, between seductions and wonders, gives an esthetic emotion, according to the each time specific and peculiar positioning of the slabs, a sensual pleasure, an exaltation of the imagination, it also exhibits its hermetic symbolism in Vassivière island's woods.

Copyright: André Morin

Sign Art
Michelangelo Pistoletto
1993-1994

Seven stones in Volvic lava placed at crossroads, 10 x 210 x 120 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born 1933 in Biella in Italy, where Michelangelo Pistoletto lives and works.

The career of this leading figure of arte povera and conceptual art is unique in many regards ; Michelangelo Pistoletto's work on the time, the mundane, the form, the abstraction is the corollary of a strong humanistic attitude and ethic based art. The "fractal" mirrors are playing an important part in his vision. the mirror is at the center of Pistoletto's work from "Autoritratto oro" (1960), the first "Quadri specchianti" (his 1961-1962's "Mirror-paintings" in which human figures or objects were painted on reflective surfaces), to "Metrocubo d'infinito", the cubic meter of infinity (1966), a sealed cube whose six inner sides are mirrors infinitely reflecting each other. Another action by Pistoletto, manifested through mundane objects and in adequacy with the purpose of Cittadellarte, was to choose a symbol, Segno Arte, his personal insignia derived from Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, this drawing-geometrical pattern of a normal man, applied to any everyday life object possible.

Copyright: André Morin

Sign Art
Michelangelo Pistoletto
1993-1994

Seven stones in Volvic lava placed at crossroads, 10 x 210 x 120 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born 1933 in Biella in Italy, where Michelangelo Pistoletto lives and works.

The idea of the visitor walking at the basis of the Segno Arte was also one of the founding elements of the Love Difference project.

Love Difference was created in 2002, promoted by the Fondazione Michelangelo Pistoletto (Cittadellarte), contemporary art center with the partnership of international institutions, cultural centers, scholars, curators and artists, it counts actually more than 400 members worldwide. The goal of the Love Difference project is to gather people and institutions of the mediterranean regions that are interested in creating new ways of overcoming the tragical conflict between the different cultures. All of the Love Difference activities are promoting an interdisciplinary approach, innovative, transparent, participative, shared and sustainable.

Copyright: André Morin

Sign Art
Michelangelo Pistoletto
1993-1994

Seven stones in Volvic lava placed at crossroads, 10 x 210 x 120 cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Ciap) in 1994

Born 1933 in Biella in Italy, where Michelangelo Pistoletto lives and works.

The humanistic dimension of Michelangelo Pistoletto is exceptional. It gives an ethical foundation to his work while amplifying and reinforcing its esthetic aspect.

At the 1968's Venice biennial, Pistoletto presents the Collaboration manifesto. From there arose the Zoo, an open group proposing an art of creative exchanges, that is to say of discovery of the other's identity. It is not about pure theatrical action nor about happenings but about an intersubjective activity aiming to create beyond the object. This kind of activity goes through the entire carrier of the artist, intertwining family, friends, artists, up to the completion of his goal through the creation of Cittadellarte in 1996 in Biella. It's the action of dividing-multiplying the mirror that is applied to the microcosmic community of Cittadellarte. In a disuse textile mill of this region once specialized in the fabrication of threads from the finest wools, in a grandiose architecture, he invites researchers, mature or blooming artists, writers, scientists in a melting pot where the exchanges of ideas can give birth to fruitful and active collaboration in the field of social dynamics.

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Andy Goldsworthy
1992

Dry granite stone dyke, H: 1.6m x L: 38m two loops of  15m and  17m

Commande of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1992

Born in England in 1956, Andy Goldsworthy lives and works in Dumfriesshire in Scotland.

Andy Goldsworthy conceived this work on the Island based on the history and geographical nature of the site and the artificial lake. 

“The British landscape is rich in dry-stone dykes surrounding the fields. Their influence on my work has been greater than the circles of prehistoric stone that I occasionally visit. Dykes are living elements in the landscape and they are a great lesson for a sculptor, the way that they use material and place. It is a great lesson for sculptors. The sheep pens have their origins in those built by shepherds to shelter th eir herds. I love to go inside them sometimes to shelter from the wind blowing in these hills. The place grows intense and calm with the dykes that delimit it, one feels protected there.

“At Vassivière I worked on the remains of a wall that once delimited a field but now, since the artificial lake was built, emerges from a wood and submerges in the water. I explored the frontier between the lake and the wood with the help of a wall that in itself is a frontier. It encloses the two spaces and accentuates their contrast. The differences between space and light in the two places emphasize the changes that have taken place. The wall evokes the sadness that one can feel for the eight villages that were drowned, but without objecting to the dam. Its presence lets one understand the nature of Vassivière. The past gives a work roots and attunes it with the place.

“I have never worked in a place that was suddenly transformed like Vassivière – today one still feels the impact – where nature, for all the transformation brought about, is still so powerful. The dyke rises above a bank revealed by the re-encounter of two natures – wood and water – and by the fluctuations caused by the dam, the climate and the seasons.”  

Copyright: Jacques Hoepffner

Iron Passages
Jean Clareboudt
1992

3 sculptures in steel, each one 200 x 200 x 52cm 

Deposit of the Cnap/Fnac (owner Cnap/Fnac) in 2000

Born in Lyon in France in 1914, Jean Clareboudt died in Turkey in 1997.

Jean Clareboudt’s work is part of the series Iron Passages: a group of ten pieces carried out during the artist’s residence at the Calder Studio in Touraine from July 1991 to March 1992. The other seven sculptures were deposited at Montbellliard, Rennes, Nozay… With regard to the Iron Passages series, he recalled how impressed he had been on one of his journeys between the banks of the Loire and Jutland (Denmark) by the changes in the landscape and the many circular signs that caught his attention (large bales of straw, millstones, etc.).

The ten steel millstones are the crystallization of this thought in movement. In a rapport both of belonging to and tension with nature, Jean Clareboudt’s sculptures modify the landscape. Here the mills exchange their value with something sensitive, and become disconcerting machines. The weight and height of each disk impose their strong presence on the spectator. At the same time, a game is set in motion: empty and full alternate and start a dialogue. The artist creates an “active” void that invites one to bend one’s knees and discover a fragment of the landscape as if through a camera. The imposing sculpture is thus the opposite of a cloisters, it makes one start to move. Between each mill, a visual and physical trajectory recalls dancing of a sort. This work leaves us with a reading of the agricultural landscape, of time working non-stop. 

Copyright: André Morin

Ever
Kimio Tsuchiya
1990

Steel structure, wooden chairs, 300 x 200 x 200 cm

Commande of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1990

Born in Fukui in Japan in 1955, Kimio Tsuchiya lives and works in his homeland.

Kimio Tsuchiya works mainly with natural materials such as wood, stone, ash and recovered and old abandoned objects to produce works through which he attempts to rediscover the language of nature.

This double use of elementary materials and found objects enables the artist to build works that refer to memory and the passing of time. The artist works in such a way that the origin of his materials is apparent, thus leading the spectator to discover a narration in them. lt;br />

Ever is an ovoid-shaped sculpture about three meters high. Inside this “egg” made of bits of metal assembled and welded to one another, the remains of old chairs are piled together, repaired, broken or not, visible through the interstices of the bits of metal that surround their slow decomposition.

Copyright: André Morin

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Eternity
Kimio Tsuchiya
1990

Wood, stones, various materials

Commande of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1990

Born in Fukui in Japan in 1955, Kimio Tsuchiya lives and works in his homeland.

Kimio Tsuchiya works mainly with natural materials such as wood, stone, ash and recovered and old abandoned objects to produce works through which he attempts to rediscover the language of nature.

This double use of elementary materials and found objects enables the artist to build works that refer to memory and the passing of time. The artist works in such a way that the origin of his materials is apparent, thus leading the spectator to discover a narration in them.

Eternity is a semi-discoid assemblage of granite and wooden beams from a demolished house in the Vassivière region. If there are no windows in traditional Japanese constructions, it is becaus e the walls are missing. This wall was built according to traditional masonry so as to show the artist’s extreme respect for recovered materials that are not violently constrained or transformed but just replaced and re-assembled.

Copyright: André Morin

Ariane, Messenger of the Gods
Alain Kirili
1990-1991

Gray cement, Compeix granite, sculpture 110 x 70 x 70cm, pedestal 110 x 50 x 65cm

Commande publique of the Ministère de la culture et de la communication (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1990

Born in 1946 in Paris in France where Alain Kirili lives and works.

Alain Kirili’s work undeniably has its origins in statuary. He expresses himself through direct carving, modeling and casting. Forged metal, plaster, earth, cement and bronze are his preferred materia ls.

The positioning of this sculpture under the forecourt of Aldo Rossi’s building, at the entrance to the Art Center, is a strong sign that both shows the specificity of the Center, namely to receive works and foster contemporary art and establishes a clear contrast, by its volume, with the architectural ensemble of the metallic verticals. This abstract sculpture (albeit based on a living feminine model) is posed on a granite pedestal, the one used for the exterior facings of the Center which is an integral part of the work. For Kirili, this work charged with a heavy memory (as is Aldo Rossi’s) may evoke by its somewhat protuberant shape an enormous guardian head announcing the entrance to the building and protecting the exhibit room. In this way, Alain Kirili approaches the function of his sculpture to that of Rodin’s latino;">Saint John the Baptist, so judiciously placed at the entrance to the MOMA in New York.

Alain Kirili brutalizes the cement, imposing his strength and will, and lends his work a heavy title that refers and alludes to mythology: Ariane, messenger of the Gods. His sculptures function as an apology of the spirit, rhythm, a refusal of immobility and silence: “My sculptures are not objects but presences, living bodies” that can be looked at from the front, from the back, and from the side. Kirili’s work springs from a "non-amnesic expressionism" which bears the traces of a “profound memory of history and tradition, in relation with the unconscious". For Alain Kirili, modeling is the art of greatest subjectivity; in this respect, Ariane, messenger of the Gods ; is a fine testimony of this dominant interest in gesture, modeling, living and ecstatic flesh: the earth transformed into flesh is felt like a body.

Copyright: André Morin

Nadir
Marc Couturier
1990

Glass, silk-screened glass, aluminum frames, carved cement 

Command of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1990

Born in Mirebeau-sur-Béze in France in 1946, Marc Couturier lives and works in Paris in France.

Marc Couturier’s work in a sense extracts things from an invisible world and tries to reveal to the spectator’s mind and eye what everyone sees and feels deep down. His work constitutes an offering void of all ego and where the retreat of the artist leaves room for the spirit that is contained in every work. 

Situated in the old arboretum of the lsland, Nadir is part of an ensemble of works carried out based on the host. For the 1988 exhibit “The Magicians of the Earth”, he contributed Host, a circular work made of plaques of hosts mounted on plexiglass. This work was exhibited in front of an external opening at the Grande Halle de la Villette. The translucent aspect of the material was conveyed to the visitors by natural light. The host, charged with spirituality, bears within it the idea of transcendence and Nadir represents this spiritual evolution not only in its shape but also in the artistic choice of placing it amidst the sacred birch trees.

The shape of the work evokes a door or a portal, a sort of fictional passage, while the motif of the white semi-circle recalls the host. The concept of the offering that instills the artist’s choice could find no better shelter than this isle on the island of the arboretum, where the location on the soft flank towards the banks of the lake are an invitation to stroll up and down, seduced by the idea of space suspended between the water and the sky, far away, between nadir and zenith.

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Bernard Calet
1990

Yellow granit, black polished granit, cement, 70 x 380 x 380 cm

Command of FRAC Limousin in 1988

Born in 1958 in France, Bernard Calet lives and works in Tours in France.

The artist uses dark glass and photography paper, together with other more traditional sculpture materials such as steel and lead, and works on a reflection on sculpture, environment, and the perception of the spectator, while elaborating on the notion of passage: from shadow to light, from object to reflection, from sculpture to image.

Situated in a well of light in the forest section, Bernard Calet chose to place his work at the foot of an old, low, partly demolished wall that has been here since the lake was created. This wall serves not only as an element of “architectural reference” but also as a “memory trace” of rural activity and the eight drowned hamlets.

Untitled resembles the foundations of a house built in granite of the region that fits the slope of the terrain quite naturally. Above these “foundations” stands a plateau of polished black granite that mirrors the horizontality of water. The color black and the polished surface recall the shimmering of the water in the lake. When one reaches the Island, one is thus struck by this dark-mirror aspect of the lake reflecting the environment, the vegetation and the sky.

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Dominique Bailly
1990

Blocks of carved oak, stones and moss, 15 x 8m

Copyright: Jacques Hoepffner

Charred wood and green moss
David Nash
1989

Charred wood, green moss, variable size

Command of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1989

David Nash, for whom “nature and reality are synonymous”, works exclusively in wood, with a power saw and more traditional tools. The works repeatedly use the same forms: the artist tries to get as close as he can to the perfect gesture. The sculptor’s previous experiences, his current aesthetic preoccupations, the themes he has already worked on and reconsidered are the essential elements of his creative process. The quality of the chosen tree, the environment in which he intervenes, are also taken into account. The ensemble of David Nash’s work consists in establishing a continuity, a translation between natural and cultural milieu.

Charred wood and green moss is a spiral inspired by Celtic tradition, made of bits of charred wood placed on a bed of moss in a clearing. David Nash chose a diseased oak to perform this work. The pieces carved by the artist were charred by fire together with the remains of the tree. 
 

Besides the chromatic rapport between the black logs and the green moss (evoking the artist’s memory of the landscape: the green vegetation and the black lake), the four elements are recalled here: the fire of the charred wood, the earth that supports them, the vital water and air. David Nash’s works are conceived to be in constant evolution with nature.

Descending Vessel, one of the two pieces created for the sculpture park at Vassivière, is carved inside a fir tree still standing, chosen for its cover, its position, and also because it threatened to collapse. In a way, David Nash assures it a new life. If Vessel indicates the vessel ready to float on the lake, it must also be read in its sense of container: the work, planted at the water’s edge and rooted in the earth, casts itself upwards towards the sky and contains the air and fire of the sun in this opening carved by the artist. The sculpture thus symbolically joins sky to earth, but also earth and sky to water. Following the 1999 storm that caused it damage, the work was destroyed in 2005 at the artist’s request.

Copyright: Jacques Hoepffner

Green place with red ants
David Jones
1988

Cast iron, 11 Compeix granite supports, 22m

Trial / For You / Traces
Bernd Lohaus
1986-1992

Granite, 100kg

Deposit of the Frac Limousin (owner Frac Limousin/Conseil régional du Limousin) in 1992

Born in Düsseldorf in Germany in 1949, Bernd Lohaus died in Antwerp in Belgium in 2010.

In his work, Bernd Lohaus above all uses powerful and dense materials such as wood and stone. He favors elements that have already been used and bear the traces of human industry and time, laden with and enriched by a past to which they are witness. They still bear the scars of cuts, notches and carvings from their past functions. The primary language figuring on the rough supports is another fundamental aspect of the work of this artist who leads us to create correspondences between language and sculpture.

A great admirer of strong, hard, solid, compact materials, he quite naturally invested the granite rock of Limousin in the sculpture garden. On removing the blocks of granite from their original context to integrate them, through dislocation and positioning, with new compositions, he is careful not to alter them, not to efface what they have been. Far from disfiguring them, he restitutes an existence for them as a work, a possibility for them to figure in our present in another form. 

This horizontal sculpture obtains its strength from the way in which Lohaus disposes and orders the three stones in relation to one another, one beside the other. 

With Trial/ For You / Traces, Bernd Lohaus plays on the forms and position of these three blocks of granite while emphasizing in a precise arrangement the inscriptions: “Trial”, “For You” and “Traces” respectively written to the left, to the right and in the middle. The appearance of an elementary language by means of isolated words written on blocks of granite rock, vestiges of geological times, invites us to see in this association an intriguing temporal contrast. Through this sculpture, Bernd Lohaus convokes both the memory of geological times and the end of prehistoric times marked by the advent of writing.

Copyright: André Morin

Sport France
Marylène Negro
1995-1998

7 wood and metal pieces of sports apparatus installed on the meadow, variable dimensions

Command of the Centre d’art (owner Ciap) in 1998

Born in Grenoble in France in 1957, Marylène Negro lives and works in Paris in France.

Since the early 90s, Marylène Negro’s work is based on a combination of procedures that question social reality, exchanging and infiltrating in that area, while rigorously and very discreetly exploring autobiographical elements. For a long time the objects that she produced had no existence other than as testimony to her preoccupations. Volatile and nomadic, they often had the appearance of posters or ephemeral assemblies of photographs, as well as tee-shirts (I love art), artist’s editions and productions with sound.

This permanent installation on the meadow is an ensemble of seven pieces of gymnasium apparatus entitled Sport France (the name of the manufacturer of this sports material), proposing a health course arranged at random. 

Between the reality from which it distances itself, and the sculpture that it is not at all completely, the work testifies to this interstice in which the artist passes the “red wire” of art style="font-size: small;"> through the very heart of the living. Faced with this proposition made by Marylène Negro, the visitor can exercise and overcome obstacles and hurdles in a health course set before him without having to follow any instructions as to use.

Copyright: Jacques Hoepffner

Steinland
Jean-Pierre Uhlen
1990

Steel, granite, resin and minium color, height: 2.9m, on the ground 6 x 5m

Deposit of the Frac Limousin (owner Frac Limousin) in 1990

Born in Mulhouse in France in 1959, Jean-Pierre Uhlen lives and works in Limoges in France.

If the artist is deeply interested in conceptual art, he is no less concerned with the relations that join architecture and sculpture. The word also occupies a great deal of his works, this being the way that he introduces the idea of representation in his sculpture. 

Jean-Pierre Uhlen produced Steinland in a gap in the trees on the edge of the lake. The work is presented as a view-point, palatino;"> but also as a signal, open both to the lake and to the opposite bank of the Island. It is therefore like a passage, a communication established between the Island and the outside. The vibrant color of the minium-tinted portico and plateau reinforces the signaling aspect of the work.

Steinland provides a fictional state of interior architecture transposed to open air. On the ground, blocks of granite assure the horizontality of the six-meter steel frame delimiting the volume of the work. The portico and plateau, whose perspective offers no practical finality, fit inside this frame on the ground.

This monumental sculpture is also presented as a picture, an ambiguous reference ever present in Jean-Pierre Uhlen’s sculptural work. The orange portico thus plays the role of a frame containing the work. The formal geometry of the sculpture recalls the rigorous conifer plantations all around and on the hill on the other side of the lake. 

Copyright:  André Morin

Sans titre
Dominique Thébault

Granite, earth, woo d, 400 x 190 x 700cm 

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1985

Born in Rouen in France in 1949, Dominique Thébault lives and works in Limoges in France.

Dominique Thébault’s Untitled consists of a display that is both vertical and horizontal. It is comprised of two distinct elements: on one hand a tree trunk planted upside down in the ground with its roots reaching skywards and supporting a small stone in which an oblique hole has been dug; on the other hand, placed in a slightly rising position on the ground, a long flat granite stone with a deep slot cut into it that prolongs the imaginary axis determined by the direction of the hole. This sculpture can be perceived in different ways, from the archaic sun-dial to a sacrificial altar.

This construction largely questions the idea of nature by fractioning and structuring the place that it occupies, but also by materializing the place of passage that it constitutes - here the passage of light, the sun rays that filter through the circular form cut out of the block of granite. This sculpture evokes more or less directly obstacles, passages, shelters. It is conceived as a metaphoric object of artistic experience. For Dominique Thébault, nature is a crossing, the bearer of signs and languages. Each portion is laden with stories and symbols. With the discontinuous perception that it provokes, walking around this sculpture allows the spectator to appreciate continuance, an awareness of time without which the very sense of the work would be lost.

Copyright:  André Morin

Untitled
Jean Estaque
1985

Granite, glass, wood, 270 x 110 x 60cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1985

Born in 1945 in Saint Girons in France, Jean Estaque lives and works in Savennes in France.

Situated on the edge of the forest a few meters from the most imposing sculpture on the Island, the tower of the Art Center, Jean Estaque’s work, carved from a block of granite, presents an asexual human figure.

This work clearly reveals three times, three dimensions. Provided with a head but without real corporal forms – a rectangular monolithic block – the surface of this figure shows two other dancing human forms engraved on the rock, and deep in the upper part a sort of window which is actually a cavity dug into the granite block and protected by a glass that encloses a group of four small unarticulated characters in painted wood.

This painting within the sculpture, precisely in its core, seems to present a somewhat clownish theater space, especially with its dismembered characters and their odd positioning, as if closed in and confined.

Copyright: André Morin

Hammer without a master
Jean-Luc Vilmouth
1985

Granite, earth, 800 x 300 x 63cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1985

Born in France in 1952, Jean-Luc Vilmouth lives and works in Paris in France.

When he defines his artistic activity, Jean-Luc Vilmouth qualifies it as “augmentation”. What interests him in this concept “is not to search for a new arithmetic of objects but rather to provoke an augmentation of the object: the same and another at the same time.” This augmentation is a transformation that confers a capacity and an importance on the object, which at first is only a ready-made. 

For Jean-Luc Vilmouth, the most banal and everyday object is worth investigating. A visual object like a hammer, taken from its context and placed in an unusual situation, implies a different perception, a different reading. The vision of this tool seems to us “worrisomely odd”. These displacements that provoke “sense sliding” are what Vilmouth’s work is all about. In 1979, Vilmouth had already shown a hammer that seemed only to have been used to dig out the cavity in which it lay useless; the cause was reabsorbed in its effect - the hammer offered itself without a master. 

On Vassivière Island he chose to present a hammer more than seven meters long and three meters wide, lying on the foliage. The head is made of three blocks of granite, while the handle is formed by a filling of earth which, like the surrounding field, is planted with grass. In Hammer without a master, Jean-Luc Vilmouth restricts himself to a very simple intervention that conserves the object’s identity while suggesting another approach to it. This tension between identity and alterity is materialized in two ways: mimetic augmentation of the model and its de-contextualization (which consists of setting it out right in the greenness of Vassivière Island). These two processes, performed together, lead us to all the perceptive and senso rial possibilities that such a piece can stimulate. Through this installation, the artist clearly explores the bipolar model-copy scheme - resemblance and dissemblance - and finally questions himself about the perception that such transfers can arouse. Deviated, augmented, presented, the hammer thus acquires more sense than its initial functional use.

Copyright: André Morin

Summer solstice
François Bouillon
1984

Granite and lampblack, 400 x 100 x 100 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1984

Born at Limoges in France in 1944, François Bouillon lives and works in Paris in France.

François Bouillon is particularly interested in civilizations such as the Dogons, the Australian aborigines or the Inuits, who live in a symbiotic, magical and pragmatic relation with nature. His work concerns essentially the manipulation of materials. Whether wood, stone or metal, the materials are used above all for their intrinsic “materiologic” qualities, but through the intervention of unexpected connections they undergo a semantic displacement that reveals them to us as resolutely invested with a symbolic dimension. 

François Bouillon thus describes Summer solstice: “The sculpture is made of two equilateral triangles that meet at the intersection to form a Jewish star. The center of gravity is perfectly geometrical. But when we move around it, we have the impression of an imbalance that is put right by an oval formed by holes pierced with locks of hair and inside which oil has been burned.” The stacking of the two blocks lends an odd impression of imbalance that the oval, formed by the traces of the absent fire, corrects. “The oval of fire links the two prisms like the solstice links two seasons.” The various geometric figures of the triangle, the star and the oval intervene in this work through complex relations of antinomy and complementariness, and help to build a monument of “unstable equilibrium”.

The notion of “solstice” - etymologically the stopping of the sun (sol “sun” and stare “to be immobile”) – materializes on Vassivière Island by means of the ovoid trace of fire that in a single unit links the two blocks of granite to the opposite positions. With Summer solstice, it is not only two contradictory forces that are put in play: the destructive force of the fire that burns, consumes and devours, and the resistance of the granite due to its crystalline essence and its very density, but at the same time two approaches to time, one limited (combustion), the other unchanging and indefinite (mineral).

Copyright: André Morin

Lieu d’écoute
Erik Samakh
1983

Granite, 230 x 690 x 60 cm

Commandof the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1984

Born 1959 in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne in France, Erik Samakh lives and works in Serres (Hautes-Alpes) in France.

Erik Samakh defines himself at the same time as a visual artist, a landscape artist, a hunter-picker of images and sounds. In 1983, he presents for his first intervention in the Island of Vassivière a "listening post". In the framework of the granite sculpture symposium, the artist proposes a special place to open up one's senses, hearing particularly. All of his future projects and installations will develop the same idea : from a given location, creating a "work-place" aiming to integrate the work with nature or the environment (landscape, architecture ...) by modifying the later with installations that are sometimes te chnically very elaborate.

Lieu d'écoute, in a much basic way than his future works, appears like a megalithic monument framing a specific space and thus inviting us to envision the landscape visually or through its sounds. With that liberation and targeting of the action of listening, the artist push the environment towards the musical score suppressing for a while all the cultural and ideological mechanisms that are restlessly affecting our perception of reality.

Copyright: André Morin

Intervention I
Dominique Rolland
1983

Granite, 80 x 200 x 266 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island.
Intervention I is a site-specific environmental sculpture, downhill from the Castle. A first rectangular shaped granite stone literally springs from the ground to rest on a second block of granite laid on the ground. Through its rougher aspect, the second stone reacts to the first one that is smoother. 

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Michael Prentice
1983

Granite, 360 x 105 x 80 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island.
"Regarding Granite, I must stress out that this material is very dear to me. The characteristics of this stone, its hardness and its density, are a real challenge each time one is face to face with it. It's mysterious, and through direct cutting it's discovered and participates itself to the evolution of the form. Thus this form becomes almost magical. The sculpture is only revealing itself slowly through the sculptor's concentration and physical toil. The sculpture I made was cut from a large stone and I carried out the project without restraint. From afar it gives the impression of an elongated landscape, but up close it's more intimate with it's various objects carved from the block that are changing with time. For instance, when it rained, the bowls are filled with water and the birds are coming to drink." (Michael Prentice) 

Copyright:  André Morin

Untitled
Jean-François Demeure

Granite, 250 x 120 x 110 cm, 263 x 32 x 24 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

Born in 1946 in Civray France, Jean-François Demeure lives and works in Limoges, France.

This work has been realized as part of the Symposium organised in 1983 on Vassivière island. This whole work carved has been produced for the first symposium by Jean-François Demeure. This work connects various elements together: a triangular stone in the wall, the central staircase with the bird, the column along the meadow and trees which going down to the lake and a final element that must be placed in the lake.

Jean-François Demeure continues his work on the granite that he sizes, cuts, abrads which adds glass and neon. For his sculptures, he uses the terms "we usually think of stone compact and closed. The geological formation of this material requires a relation to the long term, this one of its origin rooted in a territory, constituting a landscape or a place, this one of a perenniality fixed in the comfort of duration but the stone is also porous in the present tense. The true reality of time is the instant, duration is only a construction, without any absolute reality."

Copyright: André Morin

Essai (Attempt)
Constantin Popovici
1983

Granite, 140 x 200 x 90 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island."The granite material commands to me a very harsh synthesis, a reduction of the means as in the concentration of expression. The volumes, surfaces' rhythms are directed toward a geometrical unity the more concentrated possible, toward a compression of the idea itself. "Essai" belongs to the family of my "attempts" that I consider failed flights. An "outside" justification is there: a hole in the volume ... But it is not the only reason ...". (Constantin Popovici)

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Janez Pirnat
1983

Granite, 220x180x180 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island. "According to me, we are dealing with a polyvalent form that is explained by the viewer as he sees it in the process of a certain degree of illumination. It is not an absolute form, but a form creating a link between the observer, the stone and the elements that should evoke the beginning of this relationship. It's like a birth or it's nothing, if the link isn't established. I determined a trapezoidal shape in such a way that, on the three lower sides, the light will create a positive form on the negative cut sides, while the upper side, oriented toward the sun, keeps a positive form all day long.". (Janez Pirnat)

Copyright: André Morin

Petit éclat (small shard)
Henri-Aram Hairabédian
1983

Granite, 140 x 150 x 110 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

Henri-Aram Hairabédian lives and works in Dions in France.

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island. " A quarter of a century are signing space between my granite of the "island of the stones", and the "stones' country", the Karastan of my ancestors. Armenia. Time put the necessary distance for the first stone amongst the thousand and ones sculpted since that day of july 1983, be that one. Block that was already featuring the fracture, source of imagination and of all the possibles, according to its quality, the sculptor's and his tools'.

Summary of my quest, synthesis of my hopes. Time for rest has not yet come, although the sculpture at last named "Petit éclat" aspires to lie down on the Limousin's ground." (Henri-Aram Hairabédian)

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Marc Linder
1983

Granite, 210 x 210 x 480 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

Born in 1957 in Strasbourg in France, Marc Linder lives and works in Offenheim in France

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island. " My work find it's source in a reflexion related to the practice of stone cutting. Each of my works is a kind of inventory of the sculptor's gesture. To the subtracting process - sculpting the stone - answers an adding process - collecting the shards. The later are integrated in their raw form, or reduced to powder, in a new configuration.

Nothing is lost in this game of destruction/reconstruction that reallocates the volume in an other geometry". (Marc Linder)

Copyright:  André Morin

Untitled
Brad John Goldberg
1983

Granite, 360 x 210 x 320 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island. " An object placed in the room created by the low vault of those great trees will change the entire atmosphere of the space. Something like a theater set. The space would be transformed, from a very plain place to a place where one would be drawn to like by a magnet and invited to linger. I keep telling myself how rare it is to work with such trees ...

The idea of stone shadow changed into the creation of an outdoor work under three great  chestnut trees. In a distance, the shapes and scales of the trees were amplified by the presence of an object at their basis. The object is an invitation to enter the trees and discover what was inside.

A variety of stone objects both, new and old, created a physical change that prompted an even greater mood change. The space became a living-room with walls, furniture, a ceiling. To have placed the sculptural object in the back of this space created a theatrical effect allowing the front area to breathe freely. Thus the object isn't self-imposing and invite the visitor to linger here." (Brad John Goldberg)

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Takera Narita
1983

Granite, 240 x 102 x 80 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

Born 1939 in Tokyo in Japan, Takera Narita died in Paris in France in 2001.

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island. "Sculpting means approaching the block of material for a dialogue to arise between the stone's demands and the revealing tool of my creative will. I felt great joys in the effort of the cutting, allowing me to "reach out" and animate this granite, to reveal the soul of the stone, who, when I left it, had its own radiance". Takera Narita's work displays two blocks of granite one on top of the other without touching since the top block rests in equilibrium on three stones thus revealing the surrounding landscape.

Copyright: André Morin

Untitled
Gary C. Dwyer
1983

Granite, 195 x 125 x 85 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

Gary C. Dwyer lives and works in San Luis Obispo, United States

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island. " The stone was selected in the quarry at Quenouille because of its peculiar position in the soil that would be the same horizontal position on it's final location. This stone table, crude and rectangular, was firs cut by hand, and displays a surface topography suggesting the island and the location of the spring. On the upper side of the stone are a series of sculpted lines, which are, in the Ogam celtic alphabet, spelling the word "spring". The alignment and the position of the stone are the same as those of the pool which is itself alike a lot of ancient laid down stones. The top of the stone is very smooth, polished in a way, and that is only possible by hand". (Gary C. Dwyer)

Copyright: André Morin

Le Berger de Saint Genest
Pierre Digan
1983

Granite, 350 x 120 x 85 cm

Command of the Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière" (owner Syndicat mixte "le Lac de Vassivière") in 1983

Born 1941 in Paris in France, Pierre Digan lives and works at Saint Martin Château in France.

This artwork has been realized for the Symposium organized in 1983 on Vassivière island. In 1983, with financial support by the Ministry of Culture and Communication continuing its endeavor of promoting contemporary art and its goal of cultural decentralization through the Frac's founding, the association « Limousin Art Contemporain et Sculptures » (LAC&S) initiate the first artistic intervention on Vassivière island. The goal was to call upon visual artists to create works - more precisely sculptures - from a same material : granite. The choice of the material isn't innocent, it's part of a will to root art in the making with the local craftsmanship tradition of the stone cutting. Through this artistic project were arising economical and cultural issues on the durability of an ancestral know-how linked with the mineral specificity of the soil and the safeguarding of a declining economy. The association LAC&S opens in august 1983 the Limousin's Granite Sculptures Symposium located on Vassivière island, presenting the works of twelve artists and describing itself as "a stone and wood outdoor museum". The installation of those sculptures broke the grounds for an announced union between Vassivière island and contemporary art.

Saint Genest's shepherd is the only figurative sculpture of the symposium, a reassuring and comforting shepherd figure that the artist wanted to erect as an homage to a friend of his.

In the sixties, Pierre Digan and Janet Stedman created a pott ery company "La Borne" in the Cher. A place of ceramics making since the sixteenth century, its a french centre for stoneware.

Copyright: André Morin