Maxime Perrolle

Maxime Perrolle, woodturner artist

Biography

Maxime Perrolle is a sculptor who expresses himself through woodturning and whose artistic work explores the link between the tree and its essence. .

The great giants of the forests have always held a form of fascination for the artist. At the age of 15, during the Journées des Métiers d'Art, he visited the workshop of a cabinetmaker, a former student of the Ecole Boulle. First step of his path towards wood, Maxime Perrolle turns to cabinet making studies. But it is when he accompanies his brother to one of his friends wood turner, a few years later, that he really discovers his way.

In 2016, he began specialized training at the Escoulen school, a high temple of wood turning. Today, based in a workshop near Paris, Maxime Perrolle has turned away from utility and cabinet making to devote himself entirely to woodturning and sculpture. His work is guided by the veins of the material, its life lines, with an obsession: the search for lightness, the point of balance that transcends the material in prayer..

Maxime Perrolle, Lignes, Mayaro 2019

Exhibition at Mayaro Gallery

Lines, July-October 2019

Above all, there are the trees. The artist chooses each stump in the forest or from a supplier who respects the environment and the health of his forest park. Once at the workshop, he removes the heart of the tree, a sensitive and fragile organ. He then removes the bark with a chainsaw and cuts the stump into several pieces. Then the artist places each of them on the lathe and begins by making them smooth and spherical.

Then begins the most technical part of the woodturner's work, the hollowing. This step involves the use of specific tools: gouges that are used to hollow the wood and need to be sharpened several times a day, four-way calipers to measure hard-to-reach angles and thicknesses, or articulated tools that are used when the artist is working ≪ a firm neck ≫ based solely on the vibrations of the wood and his or her own feeling.

When the artist is satisfied with the shape obtained, he belts his piece and covers it with shavings in order to slowly dry out the wood and control its deformation. Then comes the work of texture and the search for material effects. Carved in a block of oak, Coquille evokes the line of a sleeping volcano's escarpment. The blacks, ochres and oxides of these sculptures, obtained through natural pigments or flashlight burning, testify to a quest for depth and minerality.

Each work is a dialogue between the massive appearance of wood and its lightness once worked, the volume of air occupied and the point of balance on the ground, minimal. Sphere, Oxide or Ikebana, like magical fruits left by the storm, all share only a tiny meeting point with the horizon.

In his momentum, Maxime Perrolle refines the mass to the breaking point and defies the laws of gravity to create works ready to join a new element, the air.

Prices

2019 - Young Creation Award, Atelier d'Art de France . 2018 - Young Talent Award, Young Talent Prize, Carrousel des Métiers d'Art et de Création . 2018 - Banque Populaire Foundation, Jury Art Trades

Past exhibitions

2019 - Révélations (Paris), International Biennial of Art and Creative Crafts, Grand Palais / AFTAB stand . 2018 - Ambiguïtés exhibition (Paris), L'Atelier gallery, Atelier d'Art de France / Carrousel of arts and crafts (Paris), Louvre Carrousel / Résonances (Strasbourg), European exhibition of arts and crafts /, National danse center / Salon Collect, Craft Council (Londres), represented by Maison Parisienne