Claude Mercier. Catalogue raisonné.
Somogy| N° d'inventaire | 20560 |
| Format | 25 x 28.7 |
| Détails | 192 p., 320 illustrations, hardcover with dust jacket. |
| Publication | Paris, 2017 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782757211991 |
A catalogue raisonné is the synthesis of a life, not just the most exhaustive inventory possible of a work, but the sum of all the research, all the emotions, all the "accidents", errors as well as moments of grace, it is the story of encounters, ruptures, and above all that of an immense work. Claude likes to talk about two encounters that were obviously decisive for the young sculptor he was in post-war Paris, the one with Henry Moore in the 1950s and the one with Alberto Giacometti, who encouraged the artist's career. But as admiring as he was of the great sculptors adept at modeling whose path he crossed very early on, he courageously took a very personal path, that of the "metal craftsman", subscribing to an innovative but difficult movement, pursuing a quest which from 1949 to 2017 allowed him to explore, from the figurative to the abstract, from recovered metal welded to bronze, all the expressions of a material which he tamed like no other: steel, nickel silver, copper, brass, brushed, hammered, patinated in a learned alchemy.
A catalogue raisonné is the synthesis of a life, not just the most exhaustive inventory possible of a work, but the sum of all the research, all the emotions, all the "accidents", errors as well as moments of grace, it is the story of encounters, ruptures, and above all that of an immense work. Claude likes to talk about two encounters that were obviously decisive for the young sculptor he was in post-war Paris, the one with Henry Moore in the 1950s and the one with Alberto Giacometti, who encouraged the artist's career. But as admiring as he was of the great sculptors adept at modeling whose path he crossed very early on, he courageously took a very personal path, that of the "metal craftsman", subscribing to an innovative but difficult movement, pursuing a quest which from 1949 to 2017 allowed him to explore, from the figurative to the abstract, from recovered metal welded to bronze, all the expressions of a material which he tamed like no other: steel, nickel silver, copper, brass, brushed, hammered, patinated in a learned alchemy.