From April 14th to May 19th, 2007, Galerie Chez Valentin presents a new exhibition by Etienne Bossut. His work operates like an image-object, image resonant of the object being moulded . The technique of resin moulding that Etienne Bossut has used for almost 30 years proofs the existence of the original object. But in another manner, much like the function of a photographic image, the moulding acts like an image that requires a necessary distance and dimensional difference to give the original object more substance and truth.
“Pas ce soir” can be read as a hommage to the heyday this vehicle once belonged. It is a shell of the original Volkswagen Beetle, riddled with identically moulded 9mm bullets holes. Lying on its right side, it could refer to an urban barricade or an abandoned monument celebrating the glory of another era; the emblematic image of the red car takes form in accords to its original nature and in true to all its details. The green underside emphasizes the impacts on the body surface. It appears almost like a double, an immutable trace of all that it is henceforth but such as it was also. The plastic moulding puts a distance with the physical weight of reality to create a lighter, more allegorical image. However, beyond appearance, the shell of the object rest in the scale of 1:1, thus the real reinserts itself and the lucidity disappears.
“Fait à la main” are three vases moulded out of resin laid out on a rack with bright colour inside and black outside and all have the resemblance of the vase design of the fifties. “Composition” is a series of moulded 33, 45 and 78 vinyls. They are mounted on a wall in a specific composition varying in size and colour. These two works did not lose the functionality of their respective original object. The vases remain containers to be use as vases and the discs reproduce the exact composition initially engraved on their surface.
“O in A”, is a moulding of a tire inserted in a moulded trestle. Two everyday objects echo of, yet divert from, the work Monogram by Rauschenberg In Monogram, a tire is put around a goat, or in a sense in the place of the trestle (or horse). The noun “la chèvre”, or “goat” in French, which, in addition to describing the animal, also defines an instrument for leverage, thus in the case of “O in A”, a play on word and object.
If the atmosphere in the exhibitions of Etienne Bossut often appears whimsical, it is not only because of the colours employed, but it is equally relevant to the material itself: plastic, a material reference to an era which embodied hope. The technique of moulding, the use of often very bright colors, and the function of multiplicity are all the rules that govern the play in all of Etienne Bossut’s work.