Assemblages

White monkey hair, a basin, a Khmer mirror, a whale rib, Niger currency, a Papuan spear, a weighing pan, a stoup shell, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a Berber tent peg, an archery target, a Koran table, a drainpipe... Nicolas Lefebvre’s assemblages combines eras, links continents, mixes cultures, blends religions, summons the sacred as much as it transfigures the trivial. He never ceases to exalt the union of the intimate and the universal through the figure of the mother- goddess, an inexhaustible image of maternal love that permeates the entire work. Assembling objects that have already lived, without distorting them, to give them a new history. Time is redemptive, passing over them, wearing them down and making them ready to meet again. In the hands of the artist, they come back to life, and the work born of their association takes shape like an obviousness waiting to be revealed. «They’re the ones who almost talk to me and tell me what to do with other objects!» says this craftsman of dreams. Always singular beneath their family resemblance, his creations generate a positive, «magical» energy... dare we say it: the energy of the imagination that made them possible, the energy of love that pacifies, humanises and improves.

Design: Studio Constanza Piaggio

Print: SNEL, Belgium