As air and iron flow... with Stéphane Dugied

Giving life to a steel wire, bringing a sheet of metal to life... how could it have been otherwise in the eyes of Stéphane Dugied, who has been fed abundantly on artistic mother's milk, in contact with this material encountered daily in his former profession as a dental technician? That's all it took for this Gepetto of metal, haunted by the overwhelming desire to bring this luminous material to life! And so it was that wires and sheets of steel, swollen with inspiration, bent between his fingers, heading for a new world: that of aesthetics.

Between the peaks of realism and the troughs of illusion, Stéphane Dugied plays with contrasts and perspectives, shadows and flashes, glimmers and reflections, depths and transparencies. Through successive additions of raw material, he shapes air and iron in turn, forging night and day the invisible and the palpable, taking the viewer on a long-dreaming journey.

Steeped in the foam of his many marine excursions, its ripples and melodies, Stéphane interprets a world of sensations, emotions and harmony, in which emptiness melts into the mirror of fullness, in a lapping of subtle silences. His works, though fixed, dance gracefully in the surrounding relief, reflecting and embracing it, to sign, with a sparkle, an entire universe dedicated to the sweetness of life, an art that Stéphane Dugied continually sculpts with his flame all around him.

Nathalie Audin

Poet photographer and journalist