Lionel Scoccimaro

Surf boards decorating the roof of an Austin painted with flames, a crucifix made of polished or lacquered wood, clusters of customized biker's helmets, an object coated with studded leather, and skulls mounted on crosses... Lionel Scoccimaro assumes the symbols, codes and practices of popular culture which he appropriates for aesthetic purposes. The artist's gesture, which is spare but precise, is the result of an autonomous and empirical praxis, deliberately compulsive, or coming from a collaboration with craftspeople whose know-how is not necessarily part of the classical artistic register—wood-turners, tattooers, smelters, coachbuilders. Between 2001 and 2003, Scoccimaro produced a set of airbrushed sculptures of modular dimensions, whose shape simultaneously conjures up a large jar, a Russian doll and a child's toy; presented individually or accompanied by pin-up tuning, each work in the Custom made series is a tribute paid to a standard-bearer of the American counter-culture, and is based on the meeting between traditional trades and the art of customizing. An attentive and endemic confrontation of genres which settles the plurality of difference, echoed by this rebellious oeuvre, from Minimalism to Pop Art, and from ornamental purity to geometric abstraction (Cécile Godefroy).