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 theirselves and thus communicate with the environment that surrounds them, constantly 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.