Christophe Rotais

Like a dreamer of the cosmos, Christophe Rotais, has been conquering space since 2003 by creating mobiles and stabiles. These moving creations, treated in a geometric and biomorphic vein, are inspired by the gravity systems developed by Calder. Executed in painted metal, all are unique pieces, and all reject order and symmetry: it is about torsion, tensions, thrusts and gravity. They reveal, in fact, the need for their author to apprehend sculpture as a system of forces and relations generating energetic tensions, vibrating scansions in space and time. The mobiles, devoid of any support, as if suspended in space, set up constellations of colored discs or other free shapes of geometry linked together by rods of great finesse and lightness. Animated by the movements of the air or of the hand, they respond only to their own kinetic laws. With the stabiles, Christophe Rotais frees the sculpture from the mass by granting a plastic treatment both to the base, a stable and load-bearing part, and to the mobile part which surmounts it. Small formats, allowing greater formal freedom, are the site of all the complexities: the plinths, with their intersecting or curved planes with sharp or rounded ends, create spans, openings, interweaving and balance games. subtle. Their mobile parts, graceful and aerial, trace graphic networks punctuated here and there with small balls and pucks. For large formats Christophe Rotais, who is more confronted with questions of gravity and balance, is just as creative. In accordance with the natural framework in which they are integrated, the stabiles for some deploy their branches majestically in space, following increasing and decreasing movements. Others imprint on it more unexpected inflections, creating an astral and floating harmony (Astres), standing with heroic pride (Air bag), noble gravity (Black bird) or Pop insolence (Pop Corn).