Small sculpture in aluminum "Spider #1", 2025

Jacques Jarrige
Small sculpture in aluminum "Spider #1", 2025
Aluminum
5.50 x 12 x 12 in

Spider #1 is Jacques Jarrige’s luminous, small-scale evocation of Louise Bourgeois’s iconic bronze Spider, reimagined through his distinctive vocabulary of hammered aluminum. Rather than reproducing the creature’s form, Jarrige distills it into gesture: a single ribbon of aluminum twisted into a suspended body that extends outward into three slender, arcing legs.
The sculpture’s abstraction frees it from literal representation. Its lines are reduced to essentials—fluid, intuitive, and shaped entirely by hand—giving the piece a sense of motion and vulnerability. The twisted central form suggests a body being pulled downward by gravity while the legs brace lightly against the ground, creating a delicate equilibrium of tension and lift.
Unlike Bourgeois’s darker, monumental spiders, Jarrige’s Spider #1 is defined by light. The hammered aluminum surface, with its soft facets and reflective skin, animates the sculpture with shifting highlights and subtle shadows. As the viewer moves around it, the piece appears to shimmer and breathe, transforming the spider’s archetypal presence into something more ethereal—an airy, abstract being of line and luminosity.
Both an homage and a departure, Spider #1 translates the symbolic resonance of the spider into Jarrige’s ongoing exploration of movement, material immediacy, and the expressive possibilities of a single, shaped ribbon of metal.