Originally from Brittany and residing in Normandy, Pascal Le Berre is a historian by training, and a former high school principal. After directing several documentaries on the history of art, he now devotes himself fully to sculpture.

Le Berre’s practice is based on the recovery of materials that carry memories; these fragments of the past become the elements of a contemporary, sober and refined language. For him, to sculpt is to extend the gestures of artisans of the past by bringing together geological, biological, and human time into a single work. His material of choice is Caen stone found in the subsoil of the Caen region in Normandy, which he likes to pair with wood and steel.

“I work a lot with reclaimed materials — old tools, old structural timber. You can see the marks left by the workers who shaped them, but also traces of time, damage caused by moisture and insects. What interests me is the confrontation of these materials and their properties: smooth and rough, curve and straight line, mineral, vegetal and industrial, dark and light.

The arrangement, the scaffolding, of mobiles and stabiles (with due homage to Calder) seeks to find a point of tension between balance and imbalance, between forms and emptiness. As in the game of Go, the placement of the pieces strives to combine harmony, meaning, and efficiency.

By making “irrational objects with symbolic function,” I joyfully place myself within a surrealist inspiration. This identity is therefore also expressed in the title — the given name — of each piece. Viewers are invited to play along; references abound and are not hidden. The name is meant to identify the object, to set the viewer on a path. It’s up to them to decide whether it suits them — or whether they prefer to choose another interpretation.”

Smaller / Indoor Sculpture