The Discrepancy of Materials
What is contemporary sculpture? This question, seemingly simple, calls less for a definition than for a shifting cartography. Sculpture today is no longer confined to a noble material or a recognizable tool. It is now traversed by a multitude of practices, approaches, and gestures that upend its traditional foundations. Artists work with bronze or chewing gum, marble or rusted metal, clay, resin, ash, textile, sugar, or even air itself. It is no longer the material’s stability that defines the artwork, but what the artist does with it: how it is activated in a space of suspense, interruption, contact, or instability.
For Rachel Whiteread, the experience of emptiness becomes central. By casting the interior of familiar objects — bathtubs, mattresses, bookshelves, or entire buildings — she transforms absence into presence. ‘House’ (1993), a full-scale cast of the empty interior of a working-class London home, is as much a memorial gesture as a sculptural act. Where classical sculpture accumulates, Whiteread reverses and subtracts.
Tony Cragg, for his part, explores the endless mutation of forms. His early work in the 1980s emerged from recycled materials, evolving toward sinuous structures that seem at once natural and artificial. In ‘Forminifera’ (1993), he assembles manufactured objects into an organic, hybrid whole that defies categorization. Cragg even speaks of ‘sculptures of thought’, emphasizing their ability to activate both imagination and perception.
Berlinde De Bruyckere develops a form of sculpture that disturbs, unsettles, and redefines the viewer’s gaze. Working with wax, wood, leather, and fabric scraps, she produces deformed, anonymous, mutilated human forms. ‘Kreupelhout – Cripplewood’ (2012–13), exhibited at the Venice Biennale, presents a bandaged tree trunk covered in scars, lying like a convalescent body. Here, matter is wound, memory, living flesh. Pathos doesn’t come from image but from the material itself.
For Ernesto Neto, sculpture becomes a sensory immersion. His soft installations, made from elastic Lycra filled with spices or sand, hang from the ceiling, brushed by bodies, activated by movement. In ‘Leviathan Thot’ (2006), installed at the Panthéon in Paris, the visitor enters a sticky, fragrant, tactile organism. Here, sculpture is no longer an object to be seen but an atmosphere to be traversed. The material exists to modify the visitor’s behavior, to shift their center of gravity.
This evolution invites a profound redefinition of both contemporary sculpture and matter. What once mattered — durability, mass, verticality, the nobility of material — no longer suffices. Today, matter is active, resistant, symbolic, and sometimes ephemeral. It becomes a vehicle for questioning the body, time, memory, social space. It is no longer a means in the service of form, but a hypothesis to be tested. Thus, contemporary sculpture and matter are constantly intertwined, in a regime of experimentation where the visible is never separate from the tactile, the political, or the living.
Active Matter, Resistant Matter
Since Richard Serra, we know that sculpture is not just something to be contemplated: it displaces, opposes, obliges. In ‘Tilted Arc’ (1981), an immense steel curve imposed in a public space, the artwork was neither meant to be admired nor bypassed effortlessly. It demanded a physical decision. This way of ‘sculpting social space’ by forcing the body to act rather than to see redefines what matter can do. A sculpture no longer signifies only through what it shows, but through what it provokes.
This logic doesn’t exclude disappearance. Gianni Motti pushes the idea to its limit: in his ‘invisible sculptures’, matter is abolished, replaced by an act or a situation. When he claims responsibility for media events or walks through a space without leaving any tangible trace, it’s absence that acts. The artwork is the rumor of its own occurrence.
Susana Solano, for her part, fabricates closed-off spaces, often in oxidized steel plates. The interiors are inaccessible. Her sculptures, like ‘Interior’ (1990), appear to offer shelter, yet prevent any occupation. They frustrate use, resist approach. It’s a matter that excludes, and in doing so, addresses.
Erwin Wurm takes the opposite approach. He gives sculpture an instant rhythm. In his ‘One Minute Sculptures’, the viewer becomes the temporary material for an absurd posture: lying on a chair with a zucchino on their head, or bent under a table balanced on a bottle. Here, matter is behavioral. The form is temporary, but its absurdity strikes like a fleeting spark in the sculptural field.
At the other end of the spectrum, Giuseppe Penone explores slowness. He removes bark from a tree to reveal the original trunk, or embeds human prints in branches, stones or bronze. Matter is not shaped; it is revealed, as if it contained the idea of its form within itself. He doesn’t compose; he exposes what was already there — in potential.
Anish Kapoor, conversely, works with the indiscernible. In ‘Descent into Limbo’ (1992), a black hole of undetermined depth opens literally in the floor. Nothing to touch, nothing to understand. Just vertigo. Matter is absent to make space for optical density, for geometric uncertainty.
Cornelia Parker fragments. Her famous ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ (1991) is the meticulous suspension of the remains of an exploded garden shed, reconstructed in space. Each fragment floats. The piece is at once explosion, stasis, recomposition. Matter is scattered — but it holds, through the memory of the shock.
Thus, in contemporary sculpture, matter is neither stable, nor noble, nor hierarchical. It can be missing, soft, explosive, unpredictable. But it is always addressed. It acts, resists, wounds or absorbs. It no longer merely carries a form: it is, in itself, the enigma. And in this unstable use of matter, sculpture ceases to designate an object. It becomes an operation, an act, a threshold to cross. That is the shifting terrain that sculpture and matter together now trace.
Emergence of a Figure
In a fragmented sculptural landscape where matter tends to disappear, fragment, liquefy, or become conceptual, René Mayer takes a step aside. He doesn’t contest these evolutions, he observes them. And from that distance, he chooses something else: a return to gesture, to the hand, to tangible volume. His starting point is neither a theory nor a critical protocol, but a sensory relationship with matter. Shaping clay, building a compact and silent form, inscribing a presence into it — this is his initial act: solitary, tactile, non-spectacular.
But this initial personal act continues. René Mayer doesn’t stop at the modeled object. He entrusts his maquettes to specialized workshops capable of transposing into marble or granite these volumes born of intuition. He doesn’t carve the stone, but he directs, adjusts, approves. The work changes scale, changes hands, changes resistance. It’s no longer the work of one, but the result of a collective process. At the origin: a fragile intuition. At the end: a stable, durable, sovereign form. This shift, from a studio model to a monumental form carved from noble matter, questions the very notion of authorship.
So how should we think of this expanded work? Is the statuette already a work of art in itself, or a working tool? Is the final piece, produced by others but under his direction, still sculpture — or already design? René Mayer doesn’t decide. He claims both regimes. He wants to create without constraints, in the freedom of the moment, but also to inscribe his forms within a continuity of material, duration, and legibility. What he invents alone, he accepts to have completed by others. What he models instinctively, he accepts to have endure through artisanal logic.
In the “Marble & Granite” series, this logic reaches a tipping point. The pieces, carved with a precision that evokes monumental goldsmithing, could easily fit within a serial production process. The idea of reproducibility is present, in potential. And yet, each sculpture preserves the singularity of its origin: a form found, not programmed. It’s this ambivalence that makes René Mayer’s work so difficult to classify: it belongs as much to an artisanal economy as to a logic of design, as much to an imaginary of the unique as to a thinking of the series.
At the opposite end, the “Viva Viva” series follows an inverse approach. Here, nothing is passed through a workshop or reproduction. Each sculpture is shaped, painted, completed by René Mayer himself. Terracotta, bright colors, playful and instinctive forms. These are immediate works, complete, closed. They do not compromise. Whereas “Marble & Granite” is constructed through mastered delegation, “Viva Viva” is not delegated. The artist’s hand is everywhere — in every curve, every accident, every burst of color.
This tension between two modes of working — collective and individual, accretive and immediate, artisanal and artistic — is not meant to be resolved. It structures the entire sculptural body of work of René Mayer. And perhaps this is its singularity: to assume an ambiguous position, at the intersection of art and design, without ever reducing one to the other. There is no purity here. There is a fluid plastic thinking, one that accepts transformation without loss, negotiation without dissolution.
Two Families – One Breath
René Mayer’s two major sculptural series, “Viva Viva” and “Marble & Granite”, may appear at odds — yet they form a deeper unity. One emerges from a regime of immediacy, play, chromatic vitality; the other from mastered slowness, a frontal relationship with mass, balance, and cut. On one side: colored sculptures, hand-shaped in terracotta, painted in acrylic, with dynamic, expressive forms. On the other: dark or light volumes, polished, carved from black marble or green granite, shaped in a silent and stable geometry.
And yet, “Viva Viva “and “Marble & Granite” are not two separate bodies of work, but two modes of the same plastic breath. What links them is neither style, nor format, nor even method, but an attitude. René Mayer never seeks effect — he seeks presence. In both, the goal is to make a form emerge that asserts itself through its meaning as much as its making — not as a message, but as a body in space.
Paolo Bonfiglio rightly speaks of ‘cephalopod sculptures, mouthless but with a vast gaze’. It’s an apt expression, capturing the paradox: these works do not speak to us, but they look at us. They have no face or intention, but they address us. That gaze — or rather, that mute exposure — echoes what Georges Didi-Huberman calls ‘pure visual’, that moment when the image (or here, the form) no longer shows something else, but obliges us to see what it is, here, in front of us.
In “Viva Viva”, each sculpture is unique, unrepeatable, untouched. René Mayer works the clay as a painter sketches: fast, directly, with full focus. Some pieces evoke archaic toys, totemic animals, playful figures. Others, like “The Transparent Eye”, “Meeting Point of Two”, or “Piercing Glaze”, are more abstract, yet maintain internal dynamism, a movement frozen mid-air. They are not symbols, but organisms. Their color is not decorative — it enhances the perception of volume, the tension between inside and outside, surface and density.
The “Marble & Granite” series, on the other hand, proceeds by crystallization. René Mayer models a small clay sculpture, then entrusts its monumental realization to skilled workshops in India. The process is slow, technical, meticulous. The resulting works — “The Egoist”, “Holy Moly”, “The Physicist” — do not seek to impress by size or material, but to stabilize a considered form. They open to light, to rain, to time. Their silence is not retreat — it is persistence. As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote, ‘what makes a work endure is what resists disappearing in the flow’.
This dialogue between immediate creation and deferred transposition, between intimate act and collective object, lies at the heart of René Mayer’s sculpture and matter. He does not seek to merge both regimes, but lets them coexist — as two parallel voices. One speaks of the instant, the other of permanence. One engages gesture, the other material. But both strive for the same thing: a form that holds — holds steady — without needing to justify itself.
In this dual practice, René Mayer echoes Henri Focillon’s reflection in ‘The Life of Forms’: ‘Matter is a force. It is not there to be subdued, but to be understood’. This is the spirit in which he works. Not to impose — but to listen for the form’s emergence. A form on the border between art and design, neither classical sculpture nor functional object — but one that materializes that shifting moment when something suddenly takes shape.
Archetypes and Fragments
The sculpted forms by René Mayer imitate nothing, yet they evoke a great deal. They are not figurative, yet they are not abstract in the modernist sense either. They inhabit an intermediate territory of reminiscence, association, and allusion. They do not depict the body, but they retain its memory. A head without a face, a genderless silhouette, a split torso, an eyeless gaze: these fragments do not recount a fall, but rather a persistence. They do not express pain or exaltation, but rather a kind of mute endurance. They stand like presences emerging from the pre-image, as if sculpture and matter were reclaiming the power to make something appear without showing it.
This tension is not new. It can be found in Germaine Richier’s transitional bodies between plant, animal, and human. In Jean Fautrier’s ‘Ravaged hostages’. In Magdalena Abakanowicz’s crowds of faceless, anonymous figures. But in René Mayer’s work, the symbolic charge is held at a distance. There is neither pathos nor message. The deformation is not suffering, it is evidence. The incompletion is not a weakness, it is a form.
In “The Egoist”, a compact block with a globular head, the gaze is an excavated absence. In “Holy Moly”, a strict verticality carved with niches, the form seems to await a voice that will never come. In “The Other Side”, two halves of figures seem to face each other without ever meeting. These sculptures do not point to a myth, but to a condition: to be here, standing, without justification.
Henri Focillon wrote that ‘every form lives its own life, independently of what it might represent’. René Mayer seems to take this claim literally. Each form he creates is an entity, a self-sufficient unit, yet porous. It tells no story, but it allows a relation to pass through. The form is not a container; it is a contact.
The stance, the frontality, the internal equilibrium of his sculptures evoke archetypes — not universal symbols, but archaic, preverbal configurations. These are not statues, but figures. Upright forms that look without seeing, nameable without having names. Their muteness is active. They compel us to remain before them, in that uncertain space Georges Didi-Huberman calls ‘pure presence’.
In this sense, René Mayer does not aim primarily to create readable works. He searches for forms that endure — not just in their material, but in the gaze. As if each sculpture, instead of being offered, were in waiting: waiting for a ground to anchor it, a sky to illuminate it, a body to answer it. They do not fall from the sky — they rise from the obscure. They are fragments of humanity — not in defeat, but in perseverance.
The place as extension of the form
Installed in the hills of Piedmont (Italy), resting directly on the grass, among trees and stones, René Mayer’s sculptures do not seem to be ‘exhibited’ but simply present. They are not there to be looked at, but to inhabit, to coexist with the light, the seasons, the moss, the insects — and people. Time doesn’t damage them: it polishes them. It doesn’t erase them: it inscribes them. Like Henry Moore’s ‘King and Queen’ installed at Dumfries in a natural setting, René Mayer’s forms find their ground, their threshold, their soil. They don’t seek a pedestal, but an anchoring point.
This relationship with place is all the stronger because his sculptures do not impose anything. They slip into the environment, they listen to it. The dark green marble becomes moss. The granite takes on the light like stagnant water. The material becomes modest, opaque, and it is this discretion that acts. Unlike so many contemporary works that colonize space, René Mayer allows his sculptures to ‘adjust’ — without a plan, without a system. They settle. They find their place through withdrawal.
This relationship of respect — or humility — is not unrelated to the way some of his forms came into being. In the “Viva Viva” series, inspired by Mexican polychrome statuettes, the painted terracotta sculptures evoke — without ever copying — the masks of the Basel carnival. René Mayer has known these figures since childhood. He has observed them, worn them, confronted them in the streets and confetti. Their disproportion, their gaping mouths, their bright colors, their grotesque but always controlled power left an imprint. But with him, nothing is quoted directly: they are remnants. It’s not the mask that is reused, but the posture, the emergence, the energy condensed in a neckless head or an off-center eye.
What connects them — these carnival masks and René Mayer’s sculptures — is what Bakhtin called ‘festive corporeality’: the way the grotesque body is always in transformation, overflowing, in permanent contact with its world. With René Mayer, sculpture closes nothing. It remains open, porous, suspended. It doesn’t erect a monument, it creates a place.
In this sense, René Mayer’s sculptures belong as much to the landscape as to the history of volume. They don’t trace a lineage; they carve out a niche. A way of being in the world through form — a form that doesn’t try to shine, but to endure. And in this manner of settling — without discourse, without emphasis — sculpture and matter find a form of duration that does not oppose life, but accords with it.
Conclusion – A form of insistence
In an age dominated by the injunction to be fast, the circulation of signs, and the volatility of images, René Mayer’s sculptural work offers a form of quiet resistance. Not a theoretical or critical opposition, but a calm refusal to follow the rhythm. There is nothing to demonstrate, to illustrate, or to comment on. Just a form that persists, a presence that must be sustained — physically, mentally, temporally. For him, contemporary sculpture and matter are not categories to be thematized, but a field of experience, a space for attention.
What René Mayer opposes to ephemerality is not monumentality: it is consistency. Not heaviness, but weight. Not solemnity, but density. His sculptures, even the most colorful ones, do not seek the gaze — they seek a haven. Even his most playful pieces — the “Viva Viva”, with their smooth, almost dancing forms — obey the same necessity: to shape, to shift, to repeat, to make something hold. They evoke the softness of driftwood, the tactility of a memory, the improvised freedom of a carnival mask, but without anecdote. It is a celebration without noise, an appearance without spectacle.
In the “Marble & Granite” series, this intent takes the form of a passage: from solitary hand to collective hand, from clay to polish, from studio to manufacture. The question is no longer one of authorship, but of a form that stabilizes without losing its singularity. In a world where everything can be produced, posted, reproduced, René Mayer keeps the initial gesture as an anchor point. And even when the work is taken up again, amplified, transposed, it remains tied to that gesture.
There is in him something of the deep artisanry Richard Sennett describes: ‘a patient engagement with the process of making, which requires the adjustment of body, mind, and time to what is being done’. René Mayer does not theorize. He works. He sculpts, adjusts, orients, observes. What he leaves behind are forms that have passed through the test of matter and of attention — that enter into duration.
What René Mayer offers is not a sculptural message, but a form of insistence: a way of existing in duration, without emphasis. To undo eloquence, to reaffirm the weight of forms. Not to follow the flow, but to inscribe within it a threshold — something that does not pass, that forces us to stay.
