Aurélien Veyrat & Lise RousselFragments

Janvier 2021

"excerpts" "Brick, modest and humble, is certainly the oldest building material created by man, but it is also widely used in 21st century architecture and avant-garde projects. Universal and alchemical, this brick therefore invites us to question our environment and establishes a direct link between architecture and landscape: the materiality of brick depends on its site and its vein of extraction, it is a direct witness of the geological strata of a unique territory. The sculptures of Fragments, especially the "columns", evoke huge tectonic cores taken from the ground and thus recall the different layers of sedimentation that have been built up over the millennia, erecting an aesthetic of archaeology. » "In the West, bricks are manufactured industrially and depend on building systems. Lise Roussel and Aurélien Veyrat wanted to combine the rusticity of natural materials and the technologies used in industry by cutting and shaping their bricks with water jets. " "More than 3,000 years ago, Genesis tells the story of the construction of the Tower of Babel, made of bricks. This episode had a considerable influence on collective history, starting with a brick, an object of great structural capacity that fits in the hand and later became synonymous with the pride of Man. In 2020, the brick seems once again to question the foundations of our civilised world through its ambiguity: embodying a truly archaic simplicity, it has become the symbol of the industrial era, of the series, of the norm, of mastery. Fragments bears witness to the pivotal situation of our time, this tipping point or point of no return where we really wonder, for the first time in the history of humanity, whether we should continue our development or slow down progress by returning to a primitive essential. Apparently fragile but in reality robust and imposing, these sculptures stand proudly before us. The terracotta elements of Fragments are both geological and archaeological remains and starting points for new architecture. »