Émilie Perotto

While Émilie Perotto is an artist, in the sense that she sculpts and writes, produces commissioned works, and is exhibited and featured in public and private collections, she doesn’t consider herself to be the “creator” or the “author” of her sculptures. In fact, she doesn’t refer to them as “works” but, rather, as “projects”. She shapes and reshapes forms, materials, their status and their uses.

All this is achieved without any mystical purpose, with no mysterious intention or particularly anti-conformist stance. Émilie Perotto simply deems herself “an intermediary, a translator, a facilitator” or a “purveyor" of her own works, of which she does not claim to be the direct creator. To her, a position of humility is inevitable, in the sense that she cannot affix her sole name to a body of work that relies on mutual aid and discussions. The act of giving a prototype to someone so that they process it according to their own skillset or mastery of a specific material is a necessary step in her work method. The moment in which the sculpture passes into someone else’s hands helps the artist understand the industrial world that surrounds her. For all intents and purposes, her sculptures are attached to her name and her parentage to them is undeniable. However, while the art world might insist that these productions are indeed Émilie Perotto’s — a distinction that certainly wouldn’t be as clear-cut in the world of design —, the artist still considers her involvement to be limited to this “simple” parentage. What ends up shaping the sculptures is their coming into contact with the people they are entrusted to, and who then manufacture them. Although this has occurred less in recent years, it explains why some of her pieces are co-signed or presented under a pseudonym.

Once their final forms have been completed, then the sculptures can express themselves: they introduce themselves in exhibition texts, or speak for themselves in the book Procession (2023). This writing process relates to another part of Émilie Perotto’s approach with the “Spécialistes de la Situation Sculpturale” [Specialists of the Sculptural Situation]. Her Manifeste de la situation sculpturale [Manifesto on the sculptural situation] formulates concepts that the artist has developed in the past few years, exploring new ways of viewing and presenting works of art. […]

Sculpture as a project, by Balqis Tandjaoui, extract
Text produced by Documents d’artistes Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, with the support of the Fondation de l’Olivier, 2024