Christophe Doucet

visual artist / sculptor, France

A certain rugged quality
L'evidence d'une certaine rudesse

by Didier Arnaudet
(Translation by Jeremy Fox)

Christophe Doucet aims to achieve a unique clarity. By means of wood and iron he creates tools and huts, cutting instruments and familar shelters. No need to wonder what these objects are. We have no diffuculty in identifying a plough, a rake, an axe or a modest construction made from planks and corrugated iron. We note the inescapably rudimentary nature of the assembled raw materials, a certain roughness in the way they are presented, but this does not mean we doubt the effectivenes of these objects and constructions in themselves.

What strikes us is the intensity conveyed by their obviousness and their necessity and it is in these qualities that we find the surprising characteristic of transposition. These objects and constructions betray a certain learned naivety. They are so obvious that they seem like ghosts of ancient covenants between matter and spirit, art and nature. Consequently, we are led to the importance accorded to the dimensions of the body, its gestures, moods, its reserves of concentrated energy.

Christophe Doucet takes us back to the salutary violence of primitive initiations. He sets himself the task of expressing the roughness, the hardness and the urgent desire to find what is most essential. In his works he celebrates the process of elaboration as if creating a substitute for a ritual art of which our age has lost the secret.

Christophe Doucet meets the challenges imposed by the body and the deadly limits of its existence, the farce of its absence, of its light and points out the usefulness of adapting its imperfections and weaknesses to a general order of things, to the balance of the universe.