René Coutelle (Sarthe 1927 – Paris 2012)
René Coutelle comes from a dynasty of stonecutters. He is very particular about the choice of his materials: marble, onyx, serpentine, alabaster and granite, but also wood, oak, walnut, and exotic woods such as rosewood or ebony. Just like Brancusi, Zadkine, Gaudier Bzeska, Manolo, Coutelle cuts freely in materials carrying a force, which is their “true feeling”.
The sculptor resorts to the art of Ancient Rome, the Caribbean, African and Cambodian art, he rediscovers simple poetry to express, or suggest a primitive and natural beauty from volumes that provide harmony and fullness, density and accuracy. His sculptures are inhabited by a song, thoughtful and exact, ardent in unison with its language. He disguises, with modesty, the original interior thrusts transposed into forms that aspire to blossom in space, the receptacle of an ascensional dynamic characteristic of his sculpture. His theme of Torses, Couples, Birds, lends itself to the simultaneous metamorphosis of the respective bodies in a voluptuous movement. The curves emit a vital fluid for a mutation, whose momentum inscribes the natural movements. Slow and subtle waves that are subject to its forms, emerges a poem, sensual, which combines the spirit to the dream, the intelligence of the touch to the musicality of the stone.
//Lydia Harambourg, Excerpt from the catalog “73 SCULPTORS, Second Biennale of sculpture”, Property Caillebotte, Yerres, 2009.//
Coutelle was coauthor of a monumental Tribute to Van Gogh (4.5 tons) made for the centenary of his death for the City of Saint-Rémy de Provence, and a Tribute to Victor Hugo (3 tons), on view in Finistère (Brittany, France).
Coutelle’s works are present in collections of Musée Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Fond National d’Art, Musée de Mont-de-Marsan, Private Collections in France, England, Japan, Sweden. He received First Prize in Despiau in 1965 and represented France at the Symposium of Yugoslavia (category stone) in 1965. Since 1957 he participated in the Young Sculpture Salon and the main salons: Salon d’Automne (member), Comparisons Salon, Sacred Art New Realities, Witness Painters International Biennial “Human Forms”, Salon de Mai, etc.
