FOURNIER Gérard, sculpture, permanent artist of Galerie Capazza since 1995

Public collections

France
- Musée de Conches
- Musée du verre, Carmaux
- Fondation Datris, L’Isle sur la Sorgue

United States of America
- Scottsdale Museum, Arizona
- Mobile Museum, Alabama

Germany
- Musée de Bamberg

The work of Gérard Fournier by Elodie Bernard (Paris, 1994)

The landscape around Gérard Fournier provides him with a rare and varied geogolical findings, because the region of Aveyron offers different aspects which are in fact very similar to one another.
So his native land aroused with in hime a passion for working with stone. He shows us the harmony of nature through his elaborate architectures made of stone and glass.
Inspired by the surrounding area, Gérard Fournier carries out his research on space and light. He brings the opaqueness of stone into opposition with the transparency of glass.
He works using different stones which are easily transformed and that the finds in pits: slate, shale, granite, marble, calcarous rocks, basalt that the combines with thin stripes of glass.
His sculptures are the outcome of long obersvations and much thinking. Because the sculptor is first and foremost under the shackles of his material: it is quite impossible to touch up a piece or to find two identical stones. Once the artist has commences his sculpture, he cannot go back.
It it through his sculptures that Gérard Fournier can find again a clos contact with the environment that he is fond of.
His work leaves a large part to instinct and spontaneity and he draws most of his inspiration from nature. He respects it and makes the most of it, taking into account the natural geometry of the shapes that he creates.
The rock carvings are caried out from drawings, according to the different criteria, encompassing natural faults, emphizing the main contours of the stone, creating a new dynamism and finding harmony and balance.
And thus he makes the most of the initial structure. The combination of glass and rock allows us to appreciate certain contrasts such constrats as between the opaqueness and transparency, the lightness and force and to create a feeling of weightlessness.

By grouping strict lines together to create space, the sculptor structures his material to put it on display and to give it motion, thus bringing it to life.
By way of its mysterious nature, the glass appears to move because of the infiltration of light. For Gérard Fournier every stone has its own past and he imagines what follows.
Nature and emotions inspire his sculptures. They reveal his liking for raw and forceful material, for the different and subtle shades of colour and for the variations dependent on the light and the weather.
Sometimes the alternations between coloured and transparent glass inspire in us peacefulness and moderation.
Being both simple – when the block is neither carved nor polished – and precious – when re.worked and polished; the artist’s hand has an invisible touche but at the same time we are aware of his quest for balance, moderation and rigour.
His sculptures fit well into their environment. There is no disruption but continuity. Besides when taken out of context, their real meaning becomes clear.
Gérard Fournier plays them off against time and observes their evolution.
He gives them an upward dynamics, expressive of man’s evolution.
These sculptures materialize a certain reflexion on the world around us, on the probles of today as well as the undeniable fact that man will have to respect more and more the laws of nature.
It is this which goes between his emotions and ideas.