Article first published on September 21, 2021
The work of Patrick Vilaire is conceptual and cerebral. The trained engineer shapes clay and metal as he sculpts ideas.
Claiming to be an artist anchored in the world, he offers a contemporary reading through the lens of ancestral knowledge and advances in Western science.
Thus, he previews the earthquake of 2010 from 2008 with Poto Mitan (the Richter Scale) and our destructive headlong rush in his series on obsession (eg death, war, power).
For him, art cannot be separated from science; the creative process is a research protocol, a new aesthetic proposal a medical discovery.
A fervent atheist, he draws from religions only to put them in communication with each other to better reveal their universal and anthropological scope. His art pays particular homage to the voodoo culture, like the sword of the academician Dany Laferrière. It is a means of rehabilitating this metaphysical and empirical heritage, the accretion of a dispersed stratified society.
Patrick Vilaire wants to make his works, syntheses of knowledge, accessible to all, so many are inscribed in the public space in Haiti as in Japan. He explains the fresco of Jalousie (a slum in the heights of Port-au-Prince), the stained glass windows of Furcy and the Man chair of the streets of Kyoto as follows:I am not a solitary artist. The strength of my work is in its participatory aspect. I am a creator because I enter into the lives of others, because I understand their mechanisms of life, because I participate in their pain. For me, the relationship with others, in my creation, is fundamental.
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