Biography
Eric Luc Maquet
Eric Luc Maquet is a Belgian architect from a long line of architects, director of a college of art, an artist first and a sculptor foremost.
He was very interested in comic strips, which he tried his hand at as a student. He was poised to become a car designer, an aeronautics draftsman, or any number of other things.
From glass to stone. From stone to steel. From steel to bronze.
Under the spell of a visit to the Cristalleries du Val-Saint-Lambert, Eric Luc started working with glass, learned to blow it, and trained at Sars-Poteries with professors from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
On his return to Belgium he was inspired by Alfred Collard's mastery of the talents of Koen Vanderstukken, and set off to discover the cold-working method of Ales Vasicek in Prague.
Eric Luc completed his initiation by experimenting with the « pastoral » technique at Murano during an internship with Davide Salvadore. He then moved to Vannes-le-Châtel to work in the CERFAV studio, accompanied by his Swiss assistant Yann Oulevay, a specialist in the art of the Italian glass masters.
Then came the time of exhibitions in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the United States, which propelled the artist towards other horizons. Eric Luc feels the urge to experience solidity, to delve into new materials. He discovers the absolute force of stone. At the same time, his sensitivity prefers the fluidity of steel.
He confronts the tensions of aluminium, seeks the sculpted movement he so admired in Calder or Rickey, and makes sculptures composed of triangles pivoting on curved steel rods on which he fixes curved surfaces in stretched aluminium. Movement and light create shimmering effects that enrich the dynamics.
Foundry — Bologna
Faced with bonding problems, he went to the Pol Bury workshop in Paris, then led by the artist's widow, in search of solutions — before suspending his work on aluminium.
New perspectives open up to him. Eric Luc is an unrepentant dreamer. He is inspired by bronze, a new world he explores with brilliance. He immerses himself body and soul, spending his nights drawing, erasing, correcting, testing the material, shaping what will pass into the hands of his Italian and Bulgarian foundries.
With the mastery of his combined talents, Eric Luc Maquet draws connections between his different experiences to reach a deeper, more profound process — that of maturity — where the work of the sculptor confronts the threat to the environment, positioning itself as a tool of struggle and hope against the foretold upheavals. A series called MÛ, as in mutation: MÛ IN SPACE.
Key pieces
De planète en planète
Blown glass + cold work · Unique piece
Titan
Blown glass, « vetro a fili » technique — Murano · ± 60 × 18 × 10 cm · Unique piece
White Stone
40 × 25 × 18 cm · Unique piece