logo



Olivier Bataille
sculptor

My approach essentially to find a shapeless stone in a quarry and to give it form.

My work purposefully limits itself to the minimum intervention, it is the choice of the stone that is important. This choice is already a creative gesture as my intervening by cutting into it allows me to extent what nature’s accidents
started.
To keep that rough aspect of the stone, to only work at certain parts of it,
to leave intentionally the marks made by the tools are all aspects of my approach. It is translating how I try to draw a free inspiration without models,
unconnected to the result.

My work in carving could be compared to what sketching is to drawing.

I suggest the human form that the stone gives me as well as accepting the accidental and the approximate offered as many fields of discovery, however, the whole is figurative. My liking is for certain coloured marbles, which, once worked, look like flesh. To depict an anatomical part that way gives rise to a stirring emotion.

The result evokes the sense of a Humain Being, petrified in marble.