French artist Romain Langlois combines his complete mastery over bronze with natural stone slabs to create sculptures with truly out-ofthe- box forms. Langlois majored in design, wanting to advance his career, one day an architectural firm he was working for encouraged him to explore sculpture. His early works were figurative often human busts. Later, as he gained a sound command of his techniques, he began mixing materials and experimenting with more abstract projects until he achieved a result that was striking and permanent. More recently, he has shifted his focus from sculpting with mixed media to sculpting with waste material. He is attempting to call the beauty, value, and nature of waste into question. He is uniting materials that seem starkly opposite from one another (e.g. bronze and natural stone) to churn out hybrid works of art underscore the notion that everything is alive, continuously moving that the only constant in life is change. Langlois works his materials like a magician to create new possibilities. Much of his time is spent labouring over techniques that yield rapid petrification and crystallization in order to so-called “metamorphize” the material. First, he must subject the materials to various chemical treatments before he can release their internal energy. He feels that the great sensitivity he pours into shaping his sculptures by hand is what enriches them. Langlois plays his viewer’s perceptions. In doing so, he stresses that not only is he conveying the inner workings of his mind, but that he also is trying to shape how his audience looks at life and death.
Sculpting with natural stone, bronze, and silver, several of Langlois’s collections, including Resonance II, Space Attraction I-II, and Serendipity have been shown at numerous exhibitions. His artwork stirs together different shapes and mediums; he evokes the viewer to ponder over humanity’s impact on nature. Simply put, he breathes new life not into nature, but rather into natural materials. An abstract sculptor and modern artist, Langlois continues to collaborate with different artists to forge truly extraordinary projects for his collections.
