This new exhibition presented in the space of the Laffanour-Downtown Gallery, 33 rue de Seine, gathers about fifteen recent pieces, realized in 8 copies, all in bronze, in various treatments: brushed, polished, mat and shiny, on the theme « sex, death and beauty ».
« I have always had an admiration and respect for the work of bronze; a symbol of perennity. I considered that its use was intended for symbolic subjects, « Important » subjects, emblematic… Until then, I never dared to pretend to immortalize anything in the noble material; but with age and after having seen all sorts of ordinary objects reproduced in bronze (even plastic toys), I told myself that I could go ahead! » P.D.R.

Texts and photos to download at www.christinepaulvé.com

Pucci de Rossi was born in Verona (Italy) in 1947 and has lived and worked in Paris since 1979.
Student of the American sculptor H.B. Walker, he began his artistic activity in 1971. He is a sculptor of ideas, forms and materials that he transmutes into everyday objects, with imagination and humor. Of purely formal appearance, full of irony, playing with detour and discrepancy, his creations are nonetheless perfectly functional and useful objects. Calling himself a « false designer », he alternates the functional with the sculptural, dodging the debate that arose in the 1990s around the (sill current) polemic between art and design. After different formal researches, with different techniques and materials, Pucci’s recent works now take into account a certain social reality. While refusing the role of the « political », « sociologist » or « scientific » artist, Pucci tries to develop his work according to the aesthetic criteria of his Italian background.
For this exhibition, these are the latest creations in pure Pucci de Rossi style, that is, halfway between art object and furniture. But unlike the baroque aspect to which Pucci has accustomed us, mixtures of wood, metal and recycled materials, often playing with irony of the detour; this new production has been designed exclusively, and for the first time in a material that ignores time: the bronze used since always to immortalize the great figures of history. Pucci has also chosen to allude to some of the eternal themes of our culture, including Greek mythology, hunting, light and the sacred… In this new approach to bronze, which is alternately black patinated, mirror polished, gilded, matte and, for some pieces, combined with another material of eternity — marble — the Pucci spirit is to be found in the work of the artist: the marble, his spirit persists and plays of a duality of perception according to the orientation of the glance by which a sculpture / seat slides from a vanity « Thanatos »*, towards a profil, then towards the back of a bust « Hypnos »*, and « Croc-blanc », a nod to Jack London’s famous novel, is a low table whose marble top, as white as the ice of frozen lakes, is supported by the famous dog; or again this magnificent antler, whose extremities stretch out in soft « Satyricon », which could also have been called Diane, because there is the evocation of the hunt and the woman; but there is more than a woman, an amalgamation of strange fruits (or animals), an organic body to body which could extend to the infinity… « Campagnolo » or « a high-end Buddhist » is a pedestal table born from the need to have a mobile support to put a laptop on, its black bronze patinated foot is a tree branch nested in a large smooth stone. Certainly, there is « disturbance », metamorphosis, and reference to classicism in the art of Pucci de Rossi, but it is also a work that militates for a hedonism where sensuality is the order of the day, as confirmed by this exhibition at the Laffanour-Downtown Gallery until January the 5th, 2012.
* In Greek mythology, Hypnos and Thanatos are twins. One personifying sleep and the other death.