Interview with Nathanaël Le Berre

The life of an artist is not plain-sailing. It is a long and winding road, filled with decisive moments, encounters that shape it and send it off in new directions, but it can also lead to dead-ends. It’s a compelling, perpetual inner exploration that takes you to places you could never have imagined.

Tell us about yourself Nathanel, this long winding road that has brought you to where you are today.

I grew up in a small village in Burgundy, in a large house a little isolated from the world, and to overcome boredom, I spent my time imagining all kinds of objects and my greatest joy was to make them . I was brought up in contact with the arts, initiated into beauty by my grandfather, architect of historical monuments, calligrapher and specialist in the sacred painting of icons.  After having studied stained glass in 1998 at the National School of Applied Arts and Crafts in Paris, I chose to devote myself to metalwork. In my studies I came across the ancient technique of brasswork and I was immediately fascinated.

i did my apprenticeship in the studio of sculptor Hervé Wahlen, and In 2004, I set up my own workshop.. i acquired the tools, steel hammers and boxwood mallets, which had belonged to Gabriel René Lacroix, (virtuoso copper maker of the 1920s), and set out on the solitary path of creation. 

The feeling of the sacred and the mystical, which permeated my childhood, reappears in my pieces which, tinged with a spiritual dimension, reveal the invisible. Several meetings open the doors of the prestigious circle of great interior designers and art galleries to me, allowing me to develop my creation in complementary directions, between sculpture and the decorative arts. 

Currently I live in Paris and my workshop is located in Aubervilliers, a dynamic city glued to Paris.

nathanael-leberre.com

Highlights of my career:

• In 2014 I received the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Intelligence of the Hand in the “Exceptional Talents” category, which is the most prestigious award in France in the field of fine crafts.

• This prize allowed me to be spotted and then selected to be one of the 15 French craftsmen and art masters exhibited in Japan within the “Wonder Lab” exhibition, which took place at the Tokyo National Museum. in Japan in September 2017. In 2019 this exhibition moved to the National Museum of China in Beijing.

Your greatest inspirations or influences?

• I wanted to explore sculpture and look for forms by discovering the work of Tony Cragg, in particular his series called “Early forms”, this notion of “primary forms” fascinates me because I find it at the origin of a work of matter, of creation. 

• I am also very impressed by the work of Simon Hantaï, whose artistic evolution is very inspiring, his journey since his first compositions whose painted forms remind me of my early research, his scriptural period, the folded, crumpled and painted canvases, then unfolded, these are works that I think about regularly.

• I also started my first brassware with the work of the goldsmith Goudji in mind https://www.pinterest.fr/AchileParis/goudji/, as an example of the technical possibilities offered by this material, associated with a universe of strong personality.

• Today I look more specifically at the work of André Dubreuil, it pushes me to get out of my comfort zone and to engage in new plastic research for my works in the workshop rather oriented on the decoration: engraving, ornaments, patinas and enamels.

Tell us a bit about your creative process? What job are you most proud of, what are you looking forward to this year?

My creative process goes like this: to start, I need a subject, a theme, a desire: in general the starting point is a detail in a painting, or a form of an old object, a painted work or sculpture that marked me, all those things that my eye perceived and recorded, sometimes without me knowing it, during my visits to exhibitions, visits to ancient monuments, or even my travels.

Then comes the phase of drawings, or studies in volume: earth, cellular concrete, or 3D software, everything is good to gradually identify my first intuition. This is the phase that I prefer: I explore, these are often aborted attempts, sometimes I push the study very far until I say to myself "here it is" and then no, Im back at zero because there is still some dissatisfaction.

Once the project has been decided in the form of plans or models, comes the manufacturing phase during which I can only modify the initial project very little (which is why I have to be really sure of myself when I commit. The pleasure of creation takes over at the end, during the decoration: the choices are endless: gilding, patinas, engravings and enamels, these will be crucial choices. As the manufacturing time is quite long, I have time to feel what will be best for the piece that is taking shape.

I am quite proud to produce pieces which, without my know-how, would have remained at the stage of an impossible project, an inaccessible dream. They are representative of what we can do with a sheet of metal when we push the technique very far, in this sense I am proud to develop, continue and know the technique of brassware.

How has this year changed your creativity or how do you see the evolution of the art industry?

As I had fewer orders and exhibition prospects at shows and fairs, I was able to devote myself more to the study of techniques that I did not have time to study in depth, techniques essentially based on the decoration and ornamentation: working with enamels, engravings, forging brass, materials and ornaments on brass. This research will be implemented to develop my style towards more storytelling. I also wondered about what I really liked doing in the workshop.

Being more creative, getting out of my comfort zone, watching and incorporating new techniques, this is how I struggle on a daily basis not to get carried away by the gloomy environment and the lack of prospects linked to this past year. 

How do you balance your time between creating furniture, sculptures and lamps?

I don't have a pre-established development strategy. Each piece is finished before starting a new one, I don't work on several pieces at the same time, because I need to see the result of my very last creation, which is generally the fruit of my very last explorations, to want to create the following one. I think I have my periods, and right now I would like more to devote to the creation of lighting. I gave up sculpture a bit because I use it for furniture, which satisfies me. But I would like to come back to it, in a less abstract form, because recently I read that Francis Bacon thought that abstraction, in painting, leads to a dead end, and this is what I felt in my research of sculptures.

My best pieces are those that evoke the human body, its presence. I wish to continue in this direction, and the technique of brassware lends itself to be marvelous!

Photography by Eric Chenal / HEART & Crafts.