‘Speaking of his approach, Hervé Rousseau says that he does not designate things but evokes them. In this sense, his work does not show rocks, houses, temples clinging to cliffs or architectural elements. He doesn’t show, he un-shows; he demonstrates that technically demanding work carries a plastic truth that doesn’t need references to exist. The evocation does this without anecdote.
Less concerned with representing existing things than with ordering volumes, Hervé Rousseau’s work is an evocation of what the universe of forms should be aiming for; a universe which, for him, is in extension (the way in which forms are built, their efficiency and their poetry). But rather than evocation, Hervé could have spoken of invocation.
His work is an invocation in which the potter asks the earth and fire to help him. You’d have to be pretty cheeky to think that offering a block of mud to the flame would contribute to the enrichment of the universe of forms I mentioned earlier. Hervé Rousseau is mad enough to believe it.
