Roland COGNET

For several decades, Roland Cognet has initiated and developed an artistic reflection around materials and forms, with the main quest being to merge the four fundamental essences—mineral, vegetable, animal, and human—within the same work. In this sense, as well as through the practice of a sculptural art of balance, Roland Cognet is in line with American and French artists close to concrete sculpture, such as Toni Grand, Robert Morris, Michel Fried, and Etienne Martin.

Roland Cognet manifests this search for balance and essence through the use of raw materials such as wood, steel, and bronze, but also through an almost always different investment of the space occupied by the work.

For example, in his Bronze series, the artist chooses to occupy the space through animal sculptures that can easily be disseminated within an exhibition route. With this series, he questions his relationship to the animal, which is metaphysical: "The animal crosses my sculpture work a bit like an apparition, a quotation, alongside and in contrast with constructed wood research like fragments of simplified landscapes." It happens that Roland Cognet does not know where the beginning of a sculpture will lead him, the artist letting himself be surprised by the otherness of his own creation. His monkey heads are a testament to this: having initially adopted the forms of dog heads, his sculptures gradually became monkey heads with blurred gazes under his hands. For Roland Cognet, this "blur of the gaze" is essential, since it is what signifies and signals the radical otherness of the animal, the irreducible strangeness of wild life.