VICTOR GUERIN: CONSTRUCTED PERSISTENCE

Victor Guerin’s sculptural practice is grounded in material memory and the poetics of transformation. Trained as both an architect and visual artist, Guerin works across disciplines, yet always begins with the object itself - not as a neutral vessel, but as something embedded with labour, history, and symbolic charge. Based in Paris and active across Europe, his work reflects a sustained engagement with industrial systems and philosophical thought. What emerges is a sculptural language that binds material agency with human presence - a language that is at once formal and metaphysical.

Guerin’s works do not represent - they respond. Found, inherited, or salvaged materials are reworked and repositioned. Their surfaces often bear the traces of time: corrosion, wear, fracture. Yet through intentional composition, they are reactivated into new spatial logics. This approach sustains a delicate contradiction: between decay and reconfiguration, between entropy and reordering.

Rien ne se crée (Nothing is Lost) & Rien ne se perd (Nothing is Created)

Drawing on Antoine Lavoisier’s axiom - “Rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd, tout se transforme” (“nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”) - this dual work reconfigures industrial and organic fragments to trace cycles of matter, memory, and transformation. Constructed from salvaged elements including Neumünster Abbey’s historic paving stones, bitumen cores, pine tar, and ficus lyrata leaves, the sculptures explore the afterlives of materials shaped by both geologic time and human intervention.

In the first configuration, transformation is meditative and embodied through juxtaposition: viscous tar and dense bitumen suggest combustion and infrastructure, while a dried leaf arcs upward in a gesture of breath, fragility, and time’s passing. The stone base, worn and marked, anchors the composition in a sense of continuity. In the second piece, the same materials are reassembled - compressed, extracted, and upright - evoking a core sample or carrotage, reminiscent of geological surveys. Here, the bitumen becomes a temporal marker, signalling fossilised processes and industrial residues.

Together, these two sculptures act as companion pieces - variations on the same conceptual chord. They reveal not disappearance, but redistribution; not decay, but endurance. Refusing spectacle or finality, Rien ne se crée, Rien ne se perd offers transformation as quiet insistence: a material thinking-through of permanence, process, and reconfiguration.

Antidote (σ) (2025)

With Antidote (σ), Guerin distills a gesture into steel. A single curved form - suspended, weightless-emerges from a surface of rust and burnish. Its gesture is ambiguous: uplift or recoil, ascent or collapse. A small wooden wedge interrupts the steel’s purity, acting not as a base but as counterbalance-an intentional asymmetry that anchors the form in tension.

This is not a monument but a proposition: that fragility and assertion can coexist within the same visual rhythm. Guerin speaks of “active ruin” - a state where the worn or broken is not erased, but integrated. Antidote (σ) holds precisely this space. It is not salvaged; it is redefined.

Liminal (2025)

Liminal occupies both physical and conceptual thresholds. Created from repurposed paving stones sourced from Luxembourg’s Neumünster Abbey - a former monastic site and prison - the work arranges ancient matter on engineered metal supports. The stones, weathered and pitted, float slightly above ground level. They are lifted just enough to be noticed, dislocated, questioned.

The installation resists both nostalgia and spectacle. Guerin does not monumentalise the stones; he repositions them. In doing so, he activates questions of custodianship, violence, and continuity. Where does meaning reside-in the object, the site, or the frame? Liminal does not answer. It leaves the viewer inside a pause: between memory and function, ritual and revision.

 Liminal, 2025, Neumünster Abbey’s paving stone, metal, Unique

Scottish Fantasy (2024)

Scottish Fantasy occupies a liminal terrain between the sculptural and the theatrical. Constructed using computer-aided coil-building techniques, the vessel form erupts at its rim into a baroque flourish: a gestural, head-like appendage whose silhouette evokes both figure and ornament. Its surface, swathed in dark green glaze and softened with wax, mimics the patina of weathered bronze, blurring distinctions between ceramic and metal.

Unlike Guerin’s typically restrained works, Scottish Fantasy leans toward an operatic register - an imagined artefact from a folkloric ritual, both animate and frozen. Yet its eccentricity is not excess; it is a studied play of silhouette, tactility, and cultural memory. The work reads as a relic of uncertain provenance - part ancient reliquary, part digital hallucination. In this hybridity, Guerin explores the fantasy of objecthood itself: not what a thing is, but what it might become when style, myth, and matter converge.

Victor Guerin’s practice stages a quiet confrontation between material and time. His works are not declarations, but sustained negotiations-with weight, decay, displacement, and return. The act of making is neither additive nor reductive-it is cyclical. Forms emerge not to dominate space, but to open it.

In an age of speed and excess, Guerin offers an alternative temporality: one in which material is neither passive nor inert, but alive with resistance, resonance, and renewal. His sculptures are not simply about what we see, but about what we allow ourselves to endure, recover, and rebuild.

Images: © Victor Guerin, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Mal H