THE TELLURISM OF MICHEL HAILLARD

Michel Haillard has a powerful artistic vocation that he carries within himself; he proves this strikingly with his oneiric furniture and his ornaments which transform certain elements of our daily life: chests of drawers, chairs, tables, side tables and armchairs, into genuine sculptural abstractions, which are at the same time utilitarian. Ultimately for him, everything becomes sculpture, or tends towards that direction.

His furniture,  ornaments and objects are all cries of form and a highlighting of the material, ; these creations are made to haunt our imagination, like the buildings of Gaudi or the sculptures of Gonzalez and Gargallo, they have the power to seduce and to fit whithin a definition of totems and taboos; they speak a strange language; that of current and contemporary prehistory, found in the present. This “powerful vein” according to Baudelaire’s beautiful expression, acts upon us; it erupts in our eye and our mind.
Michel Haillard searches for and finds the soul of each material and learns its specific language, above all, that which is most appropriate for it. Coupling light and material, coupling light and subterranean forces offered by nature; the artist tackles these every day in his alchemical den, his studio, his athanor, where on the walls, overfilled shelves, tables and even the ground: horns, bronzes, hides, cornelian, silver, glass, crystal, bones, ivory,  horsehair, rub shoulders…

Victory is at the end of this long combat, this constsant search, of this perceptible joy in each creation. Finally, neither wood, nor horn, nor bone, nor hide, nor bronze are a burden; materials that are simultaneously present and absent, which hide neither furniture, nor ornament, but on the contrary decorate, complete and ennoble them. Humble, they impose themselves gently to feed the dreams of the creator and to stimulate those of the amateur-collector. The creations of Michel Haillard are unique and so personal, marked with the seal of  great talent and thanks to a tamed barbarity, are marked forever on our retina and in our heart.

Michel Bohbot
Expert in contemporary art
Art historian