France

The artist is the perfect illustration of a new approach of the contemporary art which invests the field of traditional craft and technics in which it restores a certain poetry.

For Jérémy, everything comes from meeting and stories which bring him to create a work/witness. He gleans objects here or there - furniture, mirrors, chairs, corals - which he transforms by the addition of clothes, china, fabrics, ankles of construction, knitting... The only watchwords are the discovery and the fate. He does not define itself thus by a medium, but rather by this desire to transmit, to be interested in techniques and in endangered. Studying in the fine arts School of Nancy, he discovers one day the produced meters of a felt factory who soon to be closed. Jérémy is affected, curious also to know by himself these terrible social difficulties associated with the plant closure usually relieved by the media. Then, he goes to meet workers who are surprised with the interest of this young man who is neither a journalist, nor a politician. They show him machines, gestures and offer him the falls of felt which will have no more destination. And now Jérémy sews them, reproduces gestures, treats these felt as skins, relics and that they become this Monument to hands as he baptized him. You would not should perceive any nostalgia there, because "things cannot continue without change". He pays tribute. "I take a forgotten technic to ask new questions." He bring back life to abandoned artefacts.

"Inanimate objects, do you have a soul ? "

This is the way he look after the soul of these inanimate objects, this is the way he repairs and bandages the wounds of this furniture abandoned to create " poetic Harmonies ", to paraphrase Lamartine. He recovers them partially with the same raw obsession as Judith Scott who rolls up her woolen thread around objects of her everyday life to create cocoons of which some hopes could be reborn. Jérémy, him, does not hide. He creates hybrid structures inspired by organic forms, rolls up fabrics which he folds and holds with needles, the whole between strength and tension.

This repetitive work frees the thought and lets the hand take control. The work becomes a freeze frame congealing a process of proliferation which would be infinite, slow and inexorable. Oxymorons crowd to speak about his work: fragile strength, powerful delicacy, monumental lightness, massive fluidity… Finally, so many attempts to describe the artist himself, in the stature of rugby player softened by this naive look of the child which believes in the impossible. He looks for the overtaking - " That's it which is fun, to touch the limits of the acceptable " - and the challenge of the sportsman which produces a notorious physical effort. In the same way, " we have to feel the sweat, the effort, to ask ourselves the question of the number of the last hours or the number of used pins ", he has fun for the anecdote, without looking for the technical exploit. We remain fascinated in front of such a show. He touched the immoderation, like that was for the installation Coral Restoration, exposed in the Palace of Tokyo in 2012, when he extends the outlines of a red coral with more than 300 000 ankles of construction, or with The Freedom guiding the wool, presented in Miami, invading a whole knitting room with a Jacquard pattern loom. But Jérémy wants to avoid the seduction, the automatisms and the self-satisfaction. " More time goes by, more I would like that every work has not one square centimeter which is not thought, which is not a choice. Something brings the ambiguity and the paradox. " The beauty is important, but she does not have to be an end in itself. I want that people feel the beauty so that secondly the spectator asks himself the question of what there is behind. " The titles of the works are so many indications and keys for reading: Prison of alive strength - Door..Fabric of Vosges offered by the employees of a textile factory closed today and broken furniture ; Four Chair, Grandma. Abandoned clothes and chairs found in the street; the address. Felt falls offered by the employees of a factory closed today. Jérémy Gobé, engaged artist ? In a way, yes: " I think that it is necessary to have a personal ethic and to be guided by the idea. Then, I shall never make a work with a direct message because the most important is to show the way the work is born, produce, …"

It is necessary to read between the lines and not to stop in the illusion of the surface, in the sensation of the material... Jérémy restores a value in " the intelligence of the hand ".

Stéphanie Pioda

La Gazette Drouot , april 2016