Petit Bonhomme Blanc et Rouge, 2019

Henri Iglésis  

Henri Iglesis is of Spanish ancestry, born in 1964 in Perpignan, France, the city where he grew up, lives and works today. In 2008, this metalworker became a sculptor, through the surprising invention of a process that has become his trademark: sheet metal blowing.

The figure of his father, a turner-adjuster, was certainly determinant in the development of the young boy. Henri Iglesis spent his childhood in the studio of this craftsman, whom he fervently loved and admired.
"Don't touch anything, just watch and you'll learn," his young son was advised. Viewed in this light, it is easier to understand Henri's love of manual work and metals, which he was always exposed to and from which he draws his art.

Henri Iglésis finished his schooling in 1981, graduating with a double degree "sheet metal worker" and "welder". He set about working in his manufacturing studio without delay. He also kept regularly visiting his father's studio, in which he constructed diverse objects in hammered sheet metal. It was in 2008, as he was creating a statue representing his son, that the idea occurred to him to inject air into a piece of soldered sheet metal. He then proceeded to polish and develop this original process of shape-making, which is today officially registered, and the term "blown sheet metal" is copyrighted.

It is thus through the means of this singular technique that Iglésis expresses his whimsical artistic creativity and concretizes his overflowing imagination and mischievous sense of humor. His streamlined works are characterized by a feeling of lightness: a visual lightness of shined metal mixed with the soft flexibility of air. It is a colorful, playful and insouciant world that Henri Iglésis draws us into.