Martine Lesaffre

From Beauty to Sculpture… It is my meetings with artists, perfumers, designers, through my profession, as well as a pronounced taste for painting, sculpture and the arts in general, which have given me since long the desire to create with my own hands and have oriented me towards sculpture!

Imbued with the style of the 1930s, inspired by Modigliani, Giacometti, Brancusi or even Cocteau, Dali… I work white earth for purity, red earth patinated with wax to create the series of “Red Queens”, black earth for raw faces or for the slender silhouette of the Evening Shadow. Everything is a pretext for me to explore a character or invent new stories: the tender kiss between a man and a woman, the haughty attitude of Semiramis, the meeting of a faun and a nymph, concentration and vision in Giacometti's chiseled, weathered face. The Work of the Earth My very first contact with sculpture and the earth comes from a meeting with Volti in the 1980s. Working for Rochas perfumes, we asked him to make 2 sculptures that could illustrate Woman Perfume…

He spent long hours explaining to me how the light should circulate on a room, how much he liked the tense and round curves of a young girl… a real happiness this meeting! I have been practicing sculpture for over 10 years. I am interested in heads and their expressions. I work with a knife. Old Cocteau, Young Cocteau, Dali, Bernard Buffet. I move away more and more from a modern figuration to go towards a greater stylization. Some nudes, but I always come back to the busts and heads. I often work in series, “Têtes d'artistes” or “les Reines Rouges”, very stylized portraits, and currently nature, the mountains and their sheets in which faces are inserted! I work a lot on the patinas so that the piece reveals all its expressiveness. I also work with matte glazes, with reflections which give depth to a room!