Patrick Lorea

Patrick Loréa
The figures of time

"The figure is a pause in vision. That is to say: it is a last judgment, a "˜death sentence'"”to quote Blanchot"”where we decide on life and death; where we decide the life of death."
Federico Ferrari

If the figure marks a pause in the fleeing course of time, what can we say of the sculptures of Patrick Loréa, except that they overcome this "death sentence"? Reversing the codes of ancient sculpture, these works open, between the figure and their model, a loophole: they make time itself the implicit subject of that which they show us. Figures in ruins, vestiges, it is no longer the ideal that gives body, here, to material, it is rather the material itself that rebels against the form given to it by the hands of its creator. But what is a figure crafted from the outside by the passage of time? Or, to say it using the words of Ezra Pound: what is a "figure carved out of time"?

By Frédéric-Charles Baitinger

In the manner of Giacometti or Francis Bacon, Patrick Loréa is not trying, through his sculptures, to create a resemblance. Without lapsing into pure abstraction, these bodies and faces do not belong to a certain place or epoch: they are merely, so to speak, the anonymous suppo...