Lionel Scoccimaro

Lionel Scoccimaro was born in 1973 in Marseille, he lives and works between Marseille and Hossegor (FR)

Stable and tottering at the same time, Lionel Scoccimaro’s sculptures are full of contradictions. Their perfect and bulky curves, both delicate and well-rounded, clearly make them into objects of desire because they are also approximate, enlarged replicas of the familiar silhouette of slightly old-fashioned toys: a sort of chunky ninepin. But the strange attraction they hold, slightly fairground, slightly regressive, turns to full on eye-catching pop when their colors leap out at you. Directly borrowed from the palette of customized vehicles, from surf or rock among other sections of American sub-culture, the brilliant yellows, the flashy reds, or the apple greens color the real-fake ninepin with a more grating tone.
Herein lies the particular nature of this work. Hybrid, it hesitates between the hyper-gaudy, over-agitated and radical worlds of sport or underground music that cheerfully contest established political and social norms. Yet it also swings into other themes: gentle and childish and to an even greater extent, esthetic and plastic. Their slick and shiny aspect, resulting from airbrushed paint, inevitably anchors them in minimal sculpture; that which pays attention to surface not depth. It removes any overly expressive or painterly gesture. Here, there are no glitches in the polyester resin in which they are carefully cast.
Yet what we could take for a contemporary avatar of minimalism is not one at all: a sound comes from within. In the belly of these ninepins, Lionel Scoccimaro has placed a bell that chimes joyously when an audacious spectator brushes past one of these massive sculptures. The sound suddenly makes this piece an inhabited surface and a secretly musical sculpture.
What remains is the simultaneously communal and irremediably individual nature of these sculptures, each of which has its own colors while sharing the same bell-bottom form. Far from resolving the ambiguity of this status between series and oeuvre unique, the artist clearly maintains it in offering two types of presentation: either the nine-pins thicken until they reach monumental proportions or they are more discreet and line up in a group on a shelf, comically parodying the presentation modes instituted by consumer society. True objects of desire, seductive, intriguing, covered in the show-off colors of cultural sub-groups, cast in the innocent forms of childhood, they finally stand forward as distorting mirrors of contemporary impulses: those that draw us to the enchanted world of childhood until a wild desire for transgression tips the balance toward the dark side within. Schizo sculpture.

- Text by Judicaël Lavrador, 2003, translation: Heidi Wood

Lionel Scoccimaro’s work is on display during the exhibition Denis Brun, Sydney Houillier, Stéphanie Majoral, Florent Mattei, Lionel Scoccimaro, Nano Valdès, 1999, Denis Brun, Francesco Finizio, Michel Gerson, Marta Vrablicova, Olivier Malfait, Lionel Scoccimaro, 1999.