Gaétan D’Arcy, like most self taught artists doesn’t see the limit of the media that he is working on. From time immemorial, ceramic has been mostly a two dimension universe. More than 25,000 years ago, someone must have noticed that clay when burned became hard. Four thousand years ago, the first ceramic tiles were used in Egypt and then came the golden age of Greece and Rome.
But mostly, mosaic has evolved as some sort of painting with stones or ceramics. It took Antonio Gaudi, the brilliant Catalan architect to use ceramics in three dimensions, the best example being the work in progress that is Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia. Started in 1882, construction cranes are still affixed to it. But while Gaudi’s work is highly modern, that of D’Arcy is realistic in a dreamy way. Gaudi used trencadis, shards of ceramics tiles, ceramics objects to created a new world, in a style so modern that we tend to forget that it dates one hundred years. D’Arcy uses ceramics tiles, cut one by one, using them as is palette.
The effect is one like the mosaic from the Romans time, but then the third dimension comes into view. It is truly unique…