The visible and the invisible
The masks and puppets on this site were tailor-made for actors or dancers. They are the result of research carried out with directors, choreographers, creative teams. Half-mask, full-mask, hood-mask, with more or less sharp volumes, more or less soft lines, more or less human characterization : my choices are guided by texts, bodies of work of reference, talks with the team, watching rehearsals, type of performance space. After taking a life cast of the performer, I start by modelling the shape of the mask with clay. This form is then either molded or thermoformed . Eventually the mask is covered with materials which vary depending on the project .
When I was a child a great deal of my time was spent observing faces, filling my books with scribbles, making puppets. Later, when I went to the école Jacques Lecoq in Paris, I understood that the mask, with its childish and tragic nature, would enable me to translate my relation to existence and to the theatre. I went to Padua in Italy to learn leather mask-making technique with the Sartori family : lines, planes, economy of signs. Even today these concepts continue to be fundamental in my work.
But I have distanced my work from the world of the Commedia dell’arte for a long time now.
First the sublime work of Werner Strub (who created masks for Benno Besson ) helped me understand that the choice of shapes, materials, colours and the concept of mask itself were vast territories to explore. Secondly working on certain texts and with a younger generation of directors led me to a research with less grotesque, starting with the matter of the human face, its elusive nature, and the questions raised by its representation.
What does one face tell us of one person? On one hand a lot, on the other hand we know how mistaken we can get by trusting too far this type of intuition, or by trying to establish categories. It is more a question of the visible and the invisible, a balance of impression and traces left by an everchanging human dimension, that can be fleeting, deceitful. That’s what I try to capture … Even with masks with a strong comical dimension, the sculpture cannot be reduced to a cliché or some sort of code. At each phase of the work, I keep aiming at something minimalistic, that is a “alive”, which resonates today, and at the same time that is open, in balance. The future dialogue between the mask and the performer will have to encourage the audience to project their own images, the mask being primarily a medium for their imagination. In order to facilitate this process, I gradually tackled the entire head, the hair and I keep looking for technical solution that combine natural materials (fabrics, fibers, cardboard…) and composite materials (silicones, resins…) .
As time goes by I have less and less certainties. Whilst grounded by my experience, I am wary of methods, recipes, rules. Masks suffer from the interest of “experts”. We have had a few theatre masters in the West but one must remember they were creators and not really passing on tradition. Theatre mask in the west was lost, and what we know today was recently reinvented. This is our luck. We may continue searching, trying, inventing.