Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea presents French artist Christian Lapie's first Italian solo show. His works are metamorphosis, a concept that not only is closely related to the sculptural technique of the matter transformation, but also to the changing process they ignite together with the space in which they are conceived. Lapie's sculptures transcend somehow themselves and thus communicate with the environment, always creating different connections and synergies that bear infinite potential along with mental and emotional configurations.
From Champagne, his homeland, a region that carries a history made of blood and battles, Lapie has learned how to feed on the memory of his land and to open his work to a fluid and limitless geography: starting from his personal experience the artist tells a universal story. Lapie is therefore a nomadic artist, listening to the call of the land and to the stories it hands down. In such way he conceives his monolithic sculptures, an hybrid between human beings and plants, since they originate and take their inspiration directly from the tree trunks and shapes. They are imposing, impressive, only apparently ghostly since their specific purpose is to build an intimate and pacific relationship with the observer, exactly like the relationship between man and Nature works, the nature that overlooks and protects us.
Lapie's bronze works share with these trunks the same rough substance. A black paste is used to cover them in order to give them a human semblance, a pacific timelessness which embodies memory and transforms itself into a guardian of the past. For this exhibition Lapie will recreate a forest inside Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea spaces, proving that also an exhibition venue has got something to tell and how it can turn itself into an elsewhere where to find a shelter, meditate and challenge ourselves. A series of monumental drawings will counterbalance the forest of sculptures which, by sharing the same themes, will turn into contemporary diptychs in which the two symmetrical faces constantly generate and destroy one another.
BIOGRAPHY
Christian Lapie attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Reims from1972 to 1977 and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1977 to 1979. He started working on paintings, researching on materials such as plaster, oxide and ash spread on unrefined canvases then assembled on rudimental frames. His forms later evolved into low reliefs, and so did the materials he used: concrete slabs, charred wood etc. After a trip in the Amazon, he started creating monumental sculptures that led him to travel all around the world: Fort 61 Sculpture Park of Echigo Tsumari, Japan; La nuit recule, Solomon Foundation, Alex France, Musée des Beaux Arts de Reims, France; The Crow's Nest, Canada; Historial Jeanne d'Arc, Rouen, France; Dans les ténèbres, Château musée de Gaasbeek, Belgium; Le pupitre des Étoiles, Parc de Sceaux, France; In Path of the Sun and the Moon, Jaipur besides many private collections in Europe, USA and Africa.