A carte blanche to Jephan de Villiers
This season, the Cordouan lighthouse gives carte blanche to the sculptor Jephan de Villiers. Artist and poet, his work plunges us into an imaginary world where man and nature are one.
(c) JDB
The artist's work
First of all, as a teenager, Jephan de Villiers created villages of earth and bark in his grandmother’s garden. This was the starting point of his work as a sculptor. In the 1960s, he discovered the reconstructed workshop of Constantin Brancusi in Paris. Then came the time of the plaster and the “Aquatial Structures”. Then, he moved to London and the exhibitions multiplied. Ten years later, he discovered the Forêt de Soignes in Brussels and picked up a wood, the first of a long list…
The discovery of the Gironde estuary
Jephan de Villiers invites us to leave our daily life to dive into an imaginary civilization coming from a past where man and nature were one. Thus, as a watchman of memories of forgotten worlds, he surveys forests and shores.
Now, the sculptor plays with feathers, roots, bark, earth, leaves etc. That’s why the Gironde estuary is therefore an extraordinary place to provoke the meeting between Man and Nature.
Carte blanche at Cordouan
Under his fingers, the materials are transformed to become characters in their own right: a people of “bird-souls”. These moving lookouts are made of bark, ray egg capsules, water chestnuts or seaweed. Like “fragments of memory”, his creations are testimonies of ancestral beliefs.
From now on, his “angels of the sea and watchers of the edge of the world” have found refuge in Cordouan. The work of Jephan de Villiers can be seen from July 10 to October 31, 2022.
