Sculptures, 2019

Here, two pieces show the Swiss artist and designer Philippe Cramer’s interest in natural phenomena charged with symbolism.
The unique works Thunderstorm or Zeus’s wrath 1 and 2 are part of a series made from Greek marble and illustrate the evocative power of nature and its hold on civilizational and cultural beliefs. Each piece is carved on a lathe from a block of Thassos marble, a very pure and uniformly white stone frequently used in ancient statuary, then incised from a design by the artist in order to create a relief. These cuts are then enhanced with gold leaf to represent lightning strikes.
The natural elements, these celestial shards, are inscribed in the genesis of our history. They are thus borrowed by various religions to represent the wrath of the gods or the manifestation of a higher power.
These cuts become graphic elements here as well, suggestive of roots or branches of trees and recalling the ancestral Japanese art of Kintsugi, which consists of repairing broken pieces of ceramics by sealing up the different pieces with a resin mixed with powdered gold.
Each piece is unique because it is incised with an individual hand-gilded motif. It’s meticulous work which contributes to illustrate the precision and the creativity of the Swiss work. The piece reflects the artist’s practice of enriching his creations with poetic metaphors borrowing from the codes, rhythms, and proportions of Nature to evoke an Ideal, in opposition to the predominant dematerialized and uniform world.

Like all of his work, the Thunderstorm (Zeus’s Wrath) series is also a representation of Philippe Cramer’s impulse to establish dialogues between the different artistic processes, the notion of functionality, and the know-how of exceptional craftsmen, too often confined to separate creative fields and victims of the distrust of interdisciplinary exchanges.