Game of scales: The main interest in this residency project is scale. Maxime Thoreau is using the new working time and area as a way of breaking a working routine. By making small models he increases the number of art pieces that he can make. On the one hand, he selects some materials for their efficiency. The model has to be done very quickly. On the other hand, he tries to use some new material (painted wood, cork, plastics). Here, the residency is used as a time for research. Making uncompleted shape is an option. Later perhaps, the scale or the material may be changed. As a new project Maxime Thoreau makes drawings. This new way of making art, for him, is an extension of possible forms. The pencil presents no technical problem with the material, however. The drawings are made up of thousands of black dots. He is using this way of drawing as a reproduction of a silverprint and as a nod to the pictures that inspire his sculptures.
Maxime Thoreau mainly takes inspiration from preexisting objects. First, he begins by searching on the internet in order to make a kind of database of pictures, sketches and technical drawings which he then reproduces as sculptural forms. The main focus of the work is then to find objects that are not specifically designed with aesthetic concerns in mind, but instead whose forms are simply the result of their function. By using a readymade shape, Thoreau attempts to minimize his own intentionality in his work, like a « sculpture anonyme ». Despite this distance, the labor of physically realizing the work remains necessary ; the artist fabricates each piece himself. Recently the origin of his sculptures is quite different. The dichotomy of « form/function » remains, but the notion of fiction is added. The technical object is not just replicated, but is almost a fake, an imitation. Not just taken as is, but instead presented as an amalgamation of multiple works and multiple perspectives.
The artist also takes inspiration from the cinema, and especially from science-fiction. A genre where the objects are certainly designed to appear technically sound, but are indeed merely artifice.
A functional fiction or a fictional function
© Maxime Thoreau, Model(e)s, Atelier GlogauAIR.