Emilie Perotto

Émilie Perotto was born in 1980 in Nice (FR), she lives and works in Lyon (FR).

“How do I construct a sculpture?… Through a practice of economy of means.
I work from rigid sheets such as industrial wood panels (plywood, particleboard, MDF), materials suitable for DIY. I transform the material into a figure by drawing and cutting into the sheet with a jigsaw, then assembling it.
I would describe the resulting figures as ‘imaginary,’ because they are the result of subtraction: I retain only the qualities of the represented object that are useful in building the sculpture and necessary for its identification.

I develop my research through several ‘families’ of pieces. The first consists of representations of objects through which I highlight my sculptural vocabulary (cutting, stacking, slotting, fitting, elevating). I assemble the components of these pieces using ‘economical’ gestures that allow me to kill two or three birds with one stone (oeuf/plat, sans titre (tapis), sans titre (les arbres)). In the case of oeuf/plat, the threaded rod that pierces both the form representing the egg white and the one representing the yolk simultaneously connects the two elements, elevates the sculpture, and suggests a spinning-top motion.

For the second family, I assemble heterogeneous ‘imaginaries’ by means of formal shifts (T.P., where a horseshoe becomes the link between nine wooden battens to form a tipi), or shifts in meaning (le champion, where the rock from which Excalibur emerges is none other than a podium).

In the third family, I connect two unrelated ‘imaginaries’ using a wooden chain. One element suggests anchoring, the other, movement. However, it’s the idea of the link itself that takes center stage, thanks to the exaggerated length of the chain and the laborious process of making it (sans titre (fragment de radeau+chaîne+flèche), sans titre (bombe/boulet+mèche/chaîne+flamme/cyprès)).

The fourth family stems from reflections on the idea of representation. Each sculpture depicts a single object, at 1.5 scale, with its profile cut out from a series of wood panels, then glued together to render the object’s thickness. Like three-dimensional drawings, these sculptures represent my ‘conquest tools’ (n°1 gun, n°2 jigsaw, n°3 sander, n°4 drill, n°5 saw), while being treated with sculptural concerns (relief, pedestal, totem, multiplicity of viewpoints…).
Indeed, I approach my sculptural practice as a territorial conquest (how to occupy a space, define a zone, erect a sculpture in it, or make the zone itself a sculpture), and I use ‘imaginaries’ directly related to this logic (fried egg, carpet, podium, group of trees as territory; cannonball, flag, tipi as signs of conquest; gun, sword, jigsaw, as weapons).

The fifth family brings together sculptures that are material expressions of studio gestures related to observing, organizing and preserving ‘leftovers,’ which I’ve labeled storage solutions (n°1 shell casings, n°2 studio wall, n°3 scrap pile, n°4 cardboard imaginary, actual scraps).

The sixth family aims to document the practice and gestures of the studio through media more suited to archiving and memory, such as video (T.P., showing the choreographed assembly of the sculpture by the same name) or publishing (chutes silences, 1:1 scale posters of portions of the studio wall).

The images produced in each of these families are somehow denied by the sculptural object itself, creating distance from the representation and allowing it to be addressed within the internal logic of the medium.
I would therefore define my artistic activity as a practice of minimal, figurative sculpture with a DIY sensibility.”

— Émilie Perotto