Guillaume Roche

Tribute to NIKI in Stainless Steel

2000

Guillaume Roche is a sculptor. Born in Lorient, graduated from the National School of Applied Arts in Paris, the artist works in Étrechy in Essonne. Stainless steel is his modeling ground. More than a favorite material, the artist obsessively pushes the limits of the material. The contrasts it provokes, solid suppleness, cold reflection, smooth roughness, massive lightness (...) give every day the tension necessary for the sculptor to work. The action is a constant round trip between body and matter. Athletic temporality where man develops the characteristics of the material through his own physical limits. But also intellectual, by the way he explores all the technical and mechanical properties of his metal skins. His research is carried out in a geometric work, which perpetuates the dynamics caused by stainless steel. Spheres, cubes, curves, parallel or perpendicular are the tools of the sculptor in the tension of his work. Form after form, each period is the deepening of a geometry in its monumental quest. His source of inspiration: the transformation of matter. It freely recomposes the metal plates cut with plasma and stamped with hammer-hammer. The artist translates movement and energy by the dynamism of the assemblages and seeks the balance of the composition. His sculptures offer us aerial movements, round shapes with powerful lines, delicate and sensual cuts. The contextualization of his Monumentales works, inscribes the approach of Guillaume Roche in the field of architecture: work of structure, lines, matter, study of a volume and its proportions according to a context and an environment. Monumental and yet light, he conceives his works, of a highly controlled stability, at the limit of their point of balance.