No one could be blamed for looking too closely at old things, they think of me.”)
Edouard Martinet’s stunning assemblage sculptures. Each piece takes about a month to complete, What seem at first to be perfectly welded birds and although he often has two or three going at once. bees, frogs and fish, are actually carefully crafted Sometimes he has a vision in his head when he from found scraps and junk parts, with nary a solder starts, and he looks for parts to fit; other times, or a weld. The realism is astonishing, particularly as he takes a pile of gizmos and lets the objects you begin to realize that the elegant fins on a fish themselves suggest his subject. are actually metal spatulas and the gills are spoons. “The phobic animals are my principal sources of Martinet’s juxtapositions are inspired; you’ll never inspiration,” Martinet says, meaning spiders, toads, look at your trash in quite the same way again. wasps, and other insects. “And the animals which
While his love of insects started with a childhood seem to be foolish or stupid, such as ostriches [or] teacher who was an entomologist, it wasn’t until fish, and I try to make them friendly, funny.” he studied art in Paris during the 1980s that his These transformations are not always understood interests collided. Martinet, who started his career at the source, though. “I often hide the real use of as a graphic designer and moved into sculpture the bits and pieces I buy,” he says, “because the in the 90s, is now an artist and art teacher. He sellers wouldn’t sell them to me. For them, the car lives in Rennes, the capital of Brittany in western parts they sell have to be used to restore cars, and France, and is a regular at flea markets, car parts that’s it. It sounds crazy to them to use these to suppliers, garage sales, and second-hand stores. make sculptures.” —Arwen O’Reilly (And of course, now that the word is out, friends, friends of friends, neighbors, and family all call him on a regular basis: “When they get rid of their
Photograph courtesy Edouard Martinet
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