NEW YORK, NY.- For more than fifteen years, Vincent Dubourg has dealt with form and metamorphosis. Like a blacksmith, the artist draws on fire, air and water to shape the contours of his creation. In great urgency he draws, permeates and marks his objects, drawing from deep sources within his being.

Simultaneously a poet of form, artist and artisan, he guides his gesture to give voice. He expresses great admiration for nature’s genius and this incomparable model dictates each of his actions. From Dubourg’s workshop in Creuse, he creates organic, dynamic, and sculptural forms guided by the daily confrontation of nature’s beauty and the perception of time. His new collection is animated by a discreet movement, delicate pigmentation, and a breath of life.

“A vortex whirls in a circular motion, it forms a vacuum, and embodies subjects to its action. In water it swirls but what happens beneath the water’s surface is hidden until it resurfaces elsewhere. If it explodes then it reconstructs, and what is absorbed into it is taken to another place. The idea behind Vortex is to take society, engulf it in a vortex and take it to a new planet and other ways of living.” - Vincent Dubourg

VINCENT DUBOURG | Q & A

Despite conventional studies at Lycée Corvisart (Paris), where you were taught graphic design and advertising, and at the Pivaut School (Nantes), where you studied industrial design, you have turned away from product design by drawing on natural materials from your first series, such as branches or scrap objects for example. Why?

It was important for me to make a decision at the end of my studies. I made the choice to be in observation, to be fairly critical about what I was seeing and especially the phenomenon of creating for creation’s sake. I wanted to get to the point. The important thing for me was to not overload the world with products required for our needs, as I observed the proliferation of objects around us. My aim was to combine the intelligence of our future needs and the alliance we can reestablish with our planet, a nature that overpowers us, which devours come what may, but that offers us a way to live differently, sustainably. I wanted to find the link with our existing heritage and to listen to nature by manipulating branches, thus restoring a form of communication between us. A dialogue was created, to which I grafted the recovery of objects that we have forgotten and abandoned. As if since some years we had had the will to forget our origins, our history.

Your work seems to develop in the confrontation with materials: wood, steel, aluminum ... the shape of the furniture is defined by the contact and tension of the gesture. You stick, deconstruct, turn away, seemingly bringing the creation into another reality. Do you consider yourself, then, a designer or a sculptor?

Designer or sculptor, you ask. What does this matter? Ultimately, the important thing is to open the drawers and not to affix any labels. My tenacious will is to re-illustrate the link to origins or the link to nature. It is also important to realize that there is no confrontation, but simply the benevolence of a material that is given or revealed, at the point of origin.

The meeting with Julien Lombrail made you, in 2006, the youngest designer at Carpenters workshop Gallery, a platform for the presentation of your work. You have been exhibited alongside Prouvé and Ron Arad in the exhibition "Metal" (2006), with Ingrid Donat (2008) in London, with solo shows at the gallery in Paris and in international fairs and now in New York next November. Have these prestigious presentations changed the way you work?

The relationship with the Carpenters Workshop Gallery over time has not changed, nor has the trust that we carry with each other. Whether in the gallery or working with the foundries, the teams has always give me strong support in my research and in the development of my work. I am fortunate to have this beautiful toolbox at my disposal.

With the Gaïa and Buccella series, you express a new approach, you mark the skin of the object, working with the welding torch directly on the surface of the matrix. How do you explain your desire to be both the creator and the artisan of your own work?

Who at the painter's place could place the colors? In the same way, there would be no transformation of matter if I were not there to ingest it, to digest it, to give birth to it and to place it back in its original state.

I do not refuse the idea of seeing an idea, a thought, a gesture realized by someone else, but I do not understand nor do I know its strength. Therefore, I prefer to commit myself to the know-how to set the tone of my will.

To justify oneself in one's art, to do oneself rather, would this signal a return to prehistory? I like to think that we do nothing by ourselves.

VINCENT DUBOURG
Vincent Dubourg’s sculptural furniture creates contemporary allusions to traditional methods of cabinet making. This evokes a nostalgic sense of the familiar, which he simultaneously distorts through his fresh approach to materials and techniques.

He poetically fuses the crafts of glass blowing, wood-bending and metal-casting to bring simple forms to life. Often taking a found object as a starting point, he bends young branches until they become unified. In Napoleon A Trointette the solid form of a bureau is harmoniously combined with the graceful curves of bronze branches. Dubourg strikes a careful balance between the found and the natural, the conventional and the novel. This fresh approach frees his work from over-categorisation.

Dubourg’s designs introduce a sense of motion to furniture typically stationary by necessity. Vent Sur La Table whirls bronze and branches upwards as though freed from the constraints of gravity but at the same time frozen forever within this structure. This sense of motion suggests the awesome force of nature, never truly tamed. Rather, the pieces suggest that it is we who are in nature’s thrall.

Vincent Dubourg offers a new perspective to furniture design, often subverting classic functional forms. In Commode à Nouvelle, Zélande, he flips the bar so that it is supported by its contents, resting on rows of up-turned glasses and bottles. A continuation of this series, Plancher à Nouvelle Zélande, has the shelves fly from the wall as if making an escape. Dubourg’s conceptual twists add a surreal element to traditional notions of craftsmanship, while never fully relinquishing an idea of the platonic forms behind it.