Grande baleine, 2023

Bernard Rebaudet  

Through several trips to Eastern Europe where he discovers the painting of contemporary artists from the School of Fine Arts in CRACOW, from which he brings back many works that he introduces to his relatives.

Installed in the Drôme the country of his wife Thérèse, his collaborator in the office and the mother of his 3 boys, he still exercises his dual activity of liberal Architect and Sculptor.

Under the influence of the Catalan sculptors Pablo GARGALLO and Julio GONZALEZ (friends of PICASSO), the beginning of the 1990s was marked by the discovery of the work of iron – a material which offers the advantage of a high speed of execution unlike wood. or stone, which he cuts with a template from sheets of thin sheet metal – he will learn during a recent visit to the ZARAGOZA museum that GARGALO did the same thing – then curves and shapes with a mallet, arc welds with semi-automatic station and finished with a patina with a blowtorch and various oxides.

This technique is used for the large volume pieces, the serpentaire and the wall heads - horse, bull, rhinoceros - which he has reproduced in patinated resin and in limited editions in Pierre REVOL's molding workshop in CREST, and for its bas-reliefs composed of several superimposed and staggered pieces in order to recreate the volume in perspective.