Toni Grand

Born in 1935 in Gallargues-le-Montueux (FR)
Died in 2005 in Mouriès (FR)

Sec, brut, une et deux refentes entières, collé avec entretoise, deux faces dressées

1974
Assembly wood elements
Longueur : 200 cm ; largeur maximum : 8,5 cm
Actuellement en dépôt : Musée des beaux-arts, Nancy
Year of Purchase: 1984

Toni Grand burst onto the art scene in the late 1960s, and has been identified, reluctantly, with the group of French visual artists called Supports/Surfaces.
For the sculptor who declares loud and clear his determination to ‘turn his back on Art’, ‘the work is the place where meaning should be lost’, but the first thing which may strike you, in the work in question, is the eclectic diversity of raw materials which always remain identifiable, even though subjected to specific treatments. The approach comes across as empirical, without concepts or premeditation. At most we may glean from this visual artist’s observations a clearly displayed desire to sidestep all aesthetic rhetoric, and all manner of set discourse. The DIY aspect of Sec, brut, une et deux refentes entières, collé avec entretoise, deux faces dressées is representative of a work which has nothing spectacular or monumental about it. The sculpture is not part of any project involving the use of space, for the context does not interest the artist. Beneath its apparent fragility this is a dense and mysterious piece, concealing the enigma of its ‘being there’.
Toni Grand, who was born in 1935, took time to explore the arcana of matter. The simply sawn wood works were followed, in the 1970s, by more complex montages to which the present work belongs, before the artist (in the 1980s) started to use the most unlikely of materials: real fish plunged into formol and preserved in resin which he assembles as the mood takes him, producing works of a rare singularity.

^{Olivier Goetz}