LEPERLIER Antoine, glass sculpture, permanent artist of Galerie Capazza since 1981

“There is a “consanguinity” of glass and ceramic materials. “Pâte de verre ” before meaning a technical process for forming glass, referred to a material stemmed from their hybridization. I work at present on their association, considering the symbolic dimensions of their physical-chemical qualities. Glass is an amorphous structure subjected to the flow and reversibility, whereas ceramic materials are related to the fixed and irreversibility. Glass, as "fluid", refers to passing time, duration that cannot be handled out, while the ceramic materials, as "fixed", refers to the crystallized time of memory.

The matter, for me, is in listening, not to the clay nor the glass as matter but as materials; because it is in the process itself by which they are shaped, that they reveal the meanings borne of which they are.

For me, they hold an idea of the time that I try to update”.

Antoine Leperlier, Extract of Meeting at the transformation point, Editions Galerie Capazza, 2013

“No substance can rival the power of glass to grant simultaneous access to the interior and exterior dimensions. It is by passing through this transparent obstacle that we move from the world of reality to the world of the imagination. Thanks to the image of this divide, we slip from physical space to the mental dimension.

Glass is to time what bronze and marble are to space. It lends substance to mental space, gives shape to duration.

Behind the glass, the world is given perspective, made visible like a memory, like an image at once both near and far. What we see behind the pane plunges us into dreams evoking memory or melancholy.

It is less the opera mundi witnessed by alchemists in their glass retorts that the tangible manifestation of their creative imagination.

If, in the three - dimensional world, shadows exist in two dimensions, we can suppose that in the four - dimensional world of memory, shadows exist in three dimensions. And just as we are attached to our shadows in space, so are we attached to our memories in time.

I seek to mould in glass these images projected by our duration in memory: images of time that ‘takes shape’ by leaving its trace, by ‘casting’ - in both senses of the word - its shadow.

These shadow-memories - the shape of absence and the void, prints made visible through the transparency of the glass - are like so many relics reminding us that, here, something proximate has been lost.

Memory is like a reliquary in transparent crystal in the heart of which duration carves its images”.

Antoine Leperlier