(*1988, FR)
Naïve Coercion, 2020
Stainless steel, enamel, marble powder
170 × 50 × 50 cm

Parks and gardens are often populated by the busts of figures, some still famous, others forgotten. Morgan Courtois’ sculpture, with its refined, sustained and suggestive eroticism, represents a contracted body evocative of falling, tension and ecstasy. Existing somewhere between voluptuous and violent, the sculpture’s flesh is like an intaglio echo of the Mannerist morbidezza of the Renaissance, whose artists strove to capture the softness and suppleness of human flesh. In Courtois’ sculpture, the flesh is tormented: it is partly scratched, but also stretched to the extreme of its plasticity. The stone surface becomes confused with the surface the skin, and as the two fuse together, they leave only the evocation of a moment.