Like an archaeologist of the modern world, Ugo Schiavi is interested in the evolution of natural and urban spaces, in the transformation of materials, in current social and political movements. His work, marked by the aesthetics of ruin, seems to strive to create new vestiges, which fix in the material traces of contemporary life while at the same time making the past of the cities he surveys resonate.
Taking the form of fragments of real or fictitious bodies, eroded by time, and transformed by the environment, his sculptures are created from mouldings, assemblages and agglomerates. His most recent research into hybrid and chimerical creatures has found Arles and its proximity to the Rhône - home of the Tarasque or the Drac, its Arlesian alter-ego, which is supposed to reside under the Grand Priory - to be particularly fertile ground for development. Over the last few months, he has therefore undertaken to cross-reference sculptures found in the museum - gargoyles from the Grand Priory, moulded on-site, but also plaster sculptures inherited from the old Arles school of drawing, which are themselves copies of famous antiques such as the Venus of Arles or the Laocoon - with various additional elements, to generate a fresh look at these artistic testimonies from the past and a reflection on the evolution of his sculpture, which is nourished by constant experimentation with a wide variety of materials: plaster, concrete, elastomer, plastiglomerate, waste of all kinds. The exhibition "Ugo Schiavi. Gargareôn" (gargareôn, the Greek root of the word throat, which refers directly to the gargoyles whose forms and symbolism he has used) features some twenty works at the crossroads between classical statuary and contemporary installation. The presence of the Rhône permeates the presentation, which includes the screening of a CGI film, co-created with the artist Jonathan Pêpe, whose flow takes us to an imaginary Arles and plunges us into the waters studded with archaeological remains and monuments that have suddenly sunk...
