White stripes

Cement, acrylic and rod steel on foam panel. Unframed.

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Auville works with construction cement. Applying techniques used in the construction and ship building industries, he spreads the cement over Ursalite (high-density foam panels), creating pieces ranging in size from one to eight square meters.

Whites is part of a body of work where the artist explores the notion of whiteness.

White is pure light (and conversely); It is the optical combination of all colours; But if you combine all the pigments colours, you will get a grey-beige, never a pure white. White is someting else.

In his explorations, Auville works with white cements, a deeply matte (and very white) material.

In this work, stripes made of two different types of cements (one more crunchy than the other) have been painted with white acrylic. Rough edges, and steel rods buried into the panel, give it an very industrial feel.

Pierre Auville is a French artist whose work investigates and incorporates the aesthetic and conceptual qualities of manufactured materials such as cement, concrete and steel. He was born in Le Havre, on the Normandy coast, and lives and works near Paris.

Auville explored many different fields before turning full time to art. He worked as a journalist, served in the French Navy, worked in emergency medical services and held various management positions in industrial companies. He worked around a lot of different kinds of manufactured materials and surfaces, which inspired him.

As his artwork evolved he experimented with different mediums, exploring various kinds of alternative media until he discovered the rawness and versatility of cement. Cement allows Auville to search for the point where the colors of human-made materials go back to their original mineral essence. He references the various color qualities of minerals in stone, ranging from Lascaux cave in France, which he visited as a kid, to cement roads in hot areas such as California, to the abandoned WW2 “blockhaus” that line the Atlantic coastline of Western Europe.

Pictorially, Auville’s aesthetic vocabulary is influenced by modern art movements such as Geometrical Abstraction, Arte Povera and Street Art.