Marc Didou (born 1963, Brest, lives and works in Lesneven – FR and Rossiglione – IT) returned to Brest School of Fine Arts to paint and draw but as soon as he left, he took up working with metal again, having done this from childhood in his father’s blacksmith’s forge. Getting back to this substance, its tangible quality, ‟this wayward matter”, which needs air and fire and the hammer to take shape, was like going back to his roots. His choice was reinforced by meeting the American sculptor Mark di Suvero (born 1933, Shanghai) in Brest then in New York, who Introduced him to the public space and the monumental. Finally there was Italy where he lived and continues to show his work, before returning to live and work in Lesneven.

This return to his roots, in every sense of the term, is also a return to nature, the nature surrounding us but also that of the Atomists of ancient Greece – a philosophical and physicist movement which stated that matter is discontinuous and made up of indivisible elements – and he retains the poetry and this ‟vision of the invisible”. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed and what appears was already there, as with the larva and the chrysalis in the butterfly.

From abstraction to natural forms, between reality and illusion, creation begins with a total review and deconstruction of the elements. It comes from industrial waste, from random fragments and Installed structures, the organic principle with the ‘Plasma’ series, the link in the chain, the mirror and the ‘Anamorphoses’; a pipe from a split and distorted pipeline becomes a tree again. By cutting, assembling and welding, the sculptor replays the cycles of life in a resistant material.

The exhibition titles, that are both poetic and descriptive, were chosen by the artist. A verb, ‘Transformât’, the imperfect subjunctive of ‘transformer, to transform’ is used as an opening statement for the pleasure of narrative and the idea of a past and an action that is still ongoing. The bas-reliefs of the series Ouvrefer result from the action of cutting the metal in two and the random shapes this produces. Reversus and Ana-morphé tackle reality and its hidden double, the appearance of form and of point of view, metaphors for thought in the artist’s actions.