Born in 1959 in a Parisian suburb in a working-class environment, Patrice Poutout was already fascinated by art as a child “without even knowing what it was”. It was his paternal grandfather who opened the door for him through books on the Impressionists that he liked to leaf through on Sundays. “I said to myself: I’ll do that when I grow up, because we have the right to invent the world!

Self-taught, the artist established in Sault works with wood before discovering steel, with the same need to “remove the superfluous to touch the skeleton of things”. The lines are pure, minimal, abstract but never devoid of meaning. This balance between form and meaning is essential. Grand torse, Thorax or the monumental Tant de nuits: each sculpture stands in the park of the Château de Charleval or in the hollow of an artist’s room like an ancestral stele, an object of memory buried in the material, which tends to represent the human being in what is most intimate but also universal.