ANTHONY CRAGG   

March 6 – may 7, 1999


		Trough this seventh show in the gallery since 1980 presenting five new works, 
Anthony Cragg go on increasing and proving one more time his creativeness.

	With scientific knowledge and starting from a concrete material he manipulates and 
transforms it, acting like a tumbler or a transformer in the way he looks for the breaking or twisting 
limit.

	It's quite obvious regarding Silent Conversation, two chinese porcelain figures standing 
back to each other, the smaller one setted on a roughly cutted gypsum base. The kind of figure 
anyone can see in the chinese restaurant all over the world. Then  their originally glazed surface is 
stripped with sand until the disparition of any trace of colour. Here is the hart of the precious 
material. Then the figures are pierced as many as they can afford it without to break, until to obtain 
some weightlessness and very new  kind of forms.

	Bearings  is made of old devonian sandstone in eight assembled parts. The red or grey tint 
proceed from the diversity of oxidation in the different layers of the original stone here underlined 
with acute angles all around the "machine-turned" forms. These shapes looks like bottles, vases 
and test-tubes but can also be seen like some pawns on a chess-board or human figures. They 
could symbolize the conversion of raw material by means of alchemy of culture and ability through 
the geological history.

	Pan is a curious mass completely covered with dice put in lines and spiralled as to 
emphasize the work on torsion.It also represents a study on the aleatory accumulation of the black 
points on each side of the numerous dice. Like an enormous tatu carapace the sculpture attracts 
the fingers touch and frustrates in its restraining fixity.

	Clear Glass Stack is a two meters high pile of common glass giving an obvious sensation 
of aggressivity in a provocative stability. The glass stack evoques in transparency the first 
anthologies of ordinary objects or contemporary archeologies realized in 1979 or 1980.

	The three column of superposed industrial plaster bowls named Torque turning on 
themselves like Dervish take place in the arched cellar. Each pot is different than the others and 
manytimes the smaller are supporting the larger. The only force wich press and maintain everything 
together is the attractive power. It could be an elegant - and vertiginous - evocation of the miracle 
represented by the miraculous harmony wich happen sometimes between human beeings.

GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL
40 RUE QUINCAMPOIX  75004 PARIS   T. 33 1 42 77 38 87  F. 33 1 42 77 59 00
www.crousel.com        galerie@crousel.com