Bronze by Jephan de Villiers - Dim 50 x 25 x 50 - Smelter : Parellada, Barcelone, Spain - also smelter for Miro, ...

Jephan de Villiers, an avant-garde ecologist, takes us out of our daily life with his creations, towards «an imaginary civilization that seems to be of a past where man and nature were one». Each of his sculptures is a poignant testimony to the lost harmony between man and nature. They all come from gleaning fragments of nature, roots, twigs, wood, bark, shells of horseshoe crabs, feathers, bugs, soil and mud… Jephan de Villiers likes to say, “I don’t invent anything, I remember.”

These small creatures with frightened eyes, sometimes draped in feathers (they are then angels) take place in boxes, on paintings, or are arranged in processions accompanied by wagons. They are named after the people of Arbonie. In the work of Jephan de Villiers we also encounter the “fragments of memory”, a kind of brain wrapped in paper covered with invented writing – rediscovered – by the artist, bound and containing a secret object. There are also the Bears that evoke the wild boar defenders of the nature in the film Princess Mononoké, or the Bolis, fetishes of the Bambaras (Mali).