Twelve days. Twelve days during which Charlie Jeffery transforms the exhibition space into his own studio in order to present the processes by which he appropriates and transforms objects and formless materials such as mud or polyurethane foam Sculpting Time presents itself as a real time accumulation of successive strata and also as a mise en abyme : Charlie Jeffery confronts his work with a personal selection of works by other artists. Sculpting Time initially evokes « the moment to sculpt ». Indeed Charlie Jeffery is interested in the physical and temporal dimensions of the artistic gesture, He thus invites us to witness the conception of a work through out the whole duration of the exhibition. The found objects and other waste materials that constitute his base matter are piled up and progressively transformed, parasitizing little by little works that he has produced during the last three years already on show in the space. The sculpture of Charlie Jeffery is not only defined by it’s result, the objectified oeuvre, but also by the experience of its fabriaction, cutting, assemblying. Indeed it is difficult to speak of a stable result since the artist seeks on the contrary the possibility of an evolutionary sculpture, which is not fixed. Thus, from time to time the artist find himself taking elements of one work to compose parts of others One also finds this taste for the physical gesture and for evolution when, armed with an axe, he divides in two an object such as a chair or a refrigerator, thus recalling the idea of the primitive state from which all living organisms begin, the division of a single cell it’s multiplication reorganisation and it’s subsequent transformation into a complex organism.

However Sculpting Time should also be understood as « the action of sculpting time », as Charlie Jeffery acts on time itself as a material, in particular through his work of cutting and reediting video. If the process of creation is important to the artist the physical presence of the viewer who enters into contact with his works at a precise moment within a particular context is equally essentiel The furniture which he produces is the best example of this preoccupation and is indebted to the works of Franz West and Michelangelo Pistoletto. As for the idea of a sculpture which takes account of the flow of time, we are reminded of the sculpture-events of Roman Signer, an important reference for Charlie Jeffery, but where Signer is interested in the fugacity of the moment, Jeffery on the other hand seeks the evocation of permanent change potentially infinite in it’s scope despite being archored in the materiality of the work of art.

The starting point for the artists work is often objects found in the street or banal materials ; cardboard, used furniture, polystyrene, expansive foam, mud, dust. It is not out of a ecological desire to recycle, indeed this choice is not ideologically motivated. In the image of the concept of “base materialism” of Georges Bataille, Charlie Jeffery creates with what is there, accessable to him, without searching to ennoble these materials by their transformation or by placing them at the sommit of any kind of hierarchy, contrary to materialist artists. He makes every effort to give them form, to reveal their potentiel, by reconfiguring them until unexpected results are obtained. Language is also a subject of predilection of the artist. He attempts most notably to embody hard-hitting sentences in malleable materials, thus exploring the plasticity of language, its appearance, the rhythm of words, and urging us to stop ourselves in front of formulations which turn out to be more complex than their tautological appearance leds us to believe. In this sense, and in the diversity of his creative approaches, we could say that his work is close to that of Bruce Nauman, another major influence.

From video, to sculpture and writing we may add a singular project, led in association with Dan Robinson since 2005, Mud office. Mud office with it’s own website (www.mudoffice.eu) is a fictional business which is a parody of the business sector, proposing absurd services linked to a material whose economique value is virtually nil, which reminds us that the oeuvre of Charlie Jeffery aslo contains a humouristic dimension touching upon nonsense. The mud office in the form of Mud orchestra will participe in the exhibition through the medium of a final performance.

Sculpting Time renders visible the multiplicity of Charlie Jefferys practices. He is at the cross roads between serveral paths and the absense of a choice of one trajectory nourriches his work as the piece Either or Either, first element in the series In/decision, bears witness, created for the show this pair of bi-directional arrows on top of echoing his preoccupation for the notion of the double, demonstrates very well that the artist is himself torn between an infinity of alternatives Thus division a notion that traverses almost all his work could be seen as being more than a simple method of working but the refletion of all the tearing which assails all conscious beings starting with his own.

Text by Isabelle Le Normand et Annabel Rioux

Charlie Jeffery was born in 1975 in Oxford. He lives and works in Paris, France. The culmination of three years residence at Mains d’Œuvres, Sculpting Time is his first solo exhibition.

Exhibition is supported by la Mairie de Paris and Di Fax