Arman

"ARMAN", ARMAND PIERRE FERNANDEZ (Nice, 1928 - New York, 2005).
"Chandelier africain", 2003.
Bronze in patinated gold, specimen XXI/XXX.
Signed and justified.
Measurements: 36 x 44 x 40 cm.

"Chandelier africain" is fully inscribed in Arman's mature stage, when the artist had consolidated a recognizable and deeply influential sculptural language within the New Realism. Made in bronze with a golden patina and conceived as an accumulation of objects - in this case spoons and metal utensils - the work transforms functional and everyday elements into a sculptural structure of strong symbolic and formal presence.

The piece takes the form of a totemic, almost ritualistic candelabrum, which refers both to the Western decorative tradition and to primitive and archaic imagery suggested by the title itself. Arman subverts the original function of the objects: stripped of their utility, they are integrated into an organic, dynamic and ascending composition, where the balance between chaos and order is essential.

"Chandelier africain" synthesizes several of his fundamental axes: the reuse of the industrial object, the reflection on consumption and seriality, and the poetic transformation of material reality. At the same time, it shows his late interest in sculpture as an autonomous object, monumental in its conception despite its contained scale.

Having become one of the most important French artists of the 20th century, Arman's work is present in the streets of various cities - in Beirut he piled up tons of battle tanks in the Place des Martyrs; in Paris dozens of clocks in front of a train station; in Roanne hundreds of forks in front of a prestigious restaurant-, decorate the interior of hotels and stores and their actions -filling an art gallery with garbage, destroying with axes the furniture of a bourgeois interior or systematically sawing violins or saxophones- have been reproduced in the press and on television. At a Parisian art fair, a 1963 work of his -Birth Control- was sold for 250,000 euros. He is currently represented at the Reina Sofia Museum, the MET in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou in Paris and the Walker Art Center.