Charlie Boisson — À propos — Slash Paris

It all starts with something spotted at the flea market, in an odd re-run of André Breton’s anecdote in The Equation of the Found Object. Often the object’s purpose can’t be inferred and, being unidentifiable, it piques the curiosity of the passer-by and the artist. Charlie Boisson is fascinated by this kind of remnant: beyond comprehension, it becomes an obsession, an aberration you can’t keep your eyes off. This fortuitous fixation raises the object to the rank of a fetish — in the religious, psychoanalytical or even Marxist sense. An entanglement to be disentangled. Which is exactly where the work of sculpture begins. Assemblage is the art of deflecting components, of opening them up to fresh interpretations by broadening their affinities. Working by association, Charlie Boisson brings objects together according to formal and symbolic concurrences shot through with anthropomorphic, not to say sexual references. In every object there implicitly endures an evocation of the human body of which it was once an attribute, when it was still affected to it and still had a purpose — now lost. This absent body has bequeathed it only its imprint, leaving it prey to limitless phantasmagoria. In the erotics of assemblage metonymy rules. Aspiring to unity, assemblage offers an all-embracing semblance of consistency, slipping elbow grease between materials and associations of ideas. The resultant ensembles, growing steadily more complex as the sculptor’s vocabulary grows steadily richer, betray an instability; appear dislocated; but never stop gleefully compensating for their shortfalls, coming to terms with their deficiencies.

— Antoine Camenen for L’ahah, 2019
(English translation : John Tittensor)