DENIS PONDRUEL

Born in 1949, lives and works in Friville-Escarbotin, France.

The visible volume is not the sculpture itself, but merely its envelope, the mold of a sculpture—encrypted, invisible, and…empty. Therein lies the difficulty in exhibiting these works as objects, whether they take the form of small blocks measuring 25 x 30 cm, or, more imposing, life-size pieces. These concrete blocks are pierced by a threshold which, through a corridor, leads to a kind of chamber. Whatever the context in which it is created, this chamber has no other function than to serve as a reserve at the heart of reality, a propitious void, a space barely removed from the world.

Excerpt from a text by JM Huitorel

Let us be spectators: what do we observe in Pondruel's work? Fullness, emptiness, shadow, light, the immaterial, the material, the rigid and the floating.

In his text, the artist highlights the journey of an idea through the labyrinth of the brain; here, he tries to materialize the immaterial:

On one side, the rigid structure of well-constructed concrete, a precise, clean, studied architecture where nothing is left to chance. Here, humanity's capacity to build perfect things is highlighted; mastery of technique reigns supreme.

On the other side, a wandering of words, fragments of disjointed, somewhat mad sentences, appear as if by magic, and then the water, rushing into inaccessible cavities, chance that the eye cannot follow. All this creates a jolt, there, between the water and the words; this is the paradox of Pondruel, enclosed within these small concrete cubes: everything and its opposite.

So these are the ideas, born and dying in our well-formed minds…

Excerpt from the text of the exhibition "rooms of mental dance", Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Germany.