Rolino Gaspari

Rolino Gaspari is above all an artist, mainly a sculptor and sometime painter who does not turn his nose up at drawing. His work is multi-faceted and protean. With a twinkle in the eye, driven as much by mathematical and scientific preoccupations as aesthetic issues, he invents, takes risks, has fun.

Using wood and modeling clay – childhood base matter – iron or ceramics, Rolino Gaspari’s sculptures play with formats, colors, forms and spatial awareness, like his series of sculptures of a strange animal, off-kilter and seemingly propped against the wall. This dark figure – half-monkey, half-cat, definitely animal – seems to have popped straight out of a child’s imagination, with its characteristic, often outsize hands. An elegy to hands that wave, make, shape, work: sculpture once more. And if sculpture doesn’t occur? Quand je ne fais pas de peinture ni de sculpture, je fais des dessins de sculptures (When I’m not painting or sculpting, I’m drawing sculptures, 1991) answers that question in charcoal on paper, with a hint of facetiousness in the title. And the body once more, with this recent, previously unseen series of garments, playing with the downy feel of the felt, which have become hanging sculptures whose vivid colors and simple, geometrical forms seem inspired by women’s fashion of the sixties.

From one series to the next, in so many variations, the artist embarks us on a journey in his world, inhabited by "an innocent and insolent chaos."

In partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse