artist/ Étienne Jacobée

France

Born in 1964, Étienne Jacobée lives and works in Chantilly. Jacobée has practiced sculpture since the mid-1980s, creating his first works in 1986. He forges and bends steel, taming it through welding, giving rise to sculptures and installations that stand in a subtle balance between the real and the fantastic, the tangible world and a metaphysical dimension. Totems, cocoons, lines and structures seem to emerge from the earth itself, embodying a vision of nature traversed by tensions between order and chaos, stability and imbalance.

From as early as 1983, choosing to travel and train in workshops with demanding craftsmanship, Jacobée gradually expanded his practice through formative collaborations and experiences. He worked notably with blacksmiths in Sokodé, Togo (1991), then in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2004), with the Coubertin foundry for bronze (1997), with the European Center for the Restoration of Architectural Heritage in Venice (1990), as well as in the Central African Republic (2000).

From the outset, recognizing an affinity with non-academic and indigenous traditions, Jacobée has placed primary importance on the expressiveness of form and its organization through the taming of matter. Drawing on gesture, rhythm and repetition, he does not reproduce pre-existing forms, but organically extends the environment, observing matter at work. Surface also plays an essential role: rough or matte, marked by visible welds, sometimes left bare, sometimes tinted with warm colors evoking the intervention of fire, or enveloped in a sandy, telluric skin. These surfaces vibrate and pulsate, generating an energetic field that conveys to the viewer a sense of weight, inner tension and scale.

His works are part of the collections of the City of Chantilly and the City of Creil.