Jacques Jarrige
his first exhibition at the gallery, his gilt Klimt lamp of 1991 was made of twisted wire, arranged in a tall, rather Klee-like construction, with twinkling bits of mirror here and there. The seemingly imbalanced appearance of Klimt and its playful arrangement of forms and textures were harbingers of what would become the core of Jarrige’s style.
Organic forms It was not long before Jarrige began to expand his notion of furniture-making beyond metalwork to include wood. By the mid-1990s he was making lush biomorphic forms, on which he lavished great energy, shaping them into subtle hollows and swells, lacquered and sometimes accented with gold leaf. For inspiration, in addition to the sculptors mentioned earlier, he looked to Alexandre Noll, the French master of the sensual and primordial in ebony and other rare woods, and an occasional maker of furniture. Since Jarrige had not formally studied furniture-making, however, he initially grappled with the techniques of the genre, the constructive means of achieving his ends. In this way he resembles American master Wendell Castle, who considers himself a sculptor who makes furniture; at the beginning of his career, Castle also lacked the basic skills of the craft. For both men, this dilemma had unexpected benefits, enabling them to think more broadly about the kind of forms that interested them before turning to the technical aspects of fabrication. As Jarrige recalls, it allowed him to view furniture with “fresh eyes.”5 Key to this unburdened approach was his choice of medium-density fiberboard (MDF) and plywood as his primary materials. The poverty of these materials had the benefit of freeing Jarrige from the classic constraints of furniture-making, allowing him to shape objects irrespective of wood grain or color and offering an opportunity to add layers or carve as he saw fit. His sculptural method is an exploration of positive and negative space, of solid and void, a reductive method that