RAPHAEL BREDA

1992, Nice – France.

After graduating, travelled to France and Europe, discovering the world and made a living as a stonecutter.

For 8 years he travelled with the “Compagnons du devoir et du Tour de France” where he had the opportunity to work on prestigious buildings, such as the cathedral of Rouen, Reims, Bordeaux and private castles.

Earned scholarship holder at the foundation of Coubertin, lived and worked 10 months in Germany in Erfurt.

Through his very artisanal experience based on the science of stone cutting called “stereotomy”, he has always felt an attraction for a more artistic part of stone cutting, and the sculpture. He, therefore, decides to continue his trip to Italy in Florence where he has been living and studying for 2 years now, at the Accademia D’Arte AD’A.

In 2019 step into the Master Class in Visual Art at the Accademia D’Arte AD’A.

In the extreme variability of artistic creation, throughout history, there are examples of realizations that have required big scenarios and other examples of realizations that have originated from specific, common situations: there is no clear difference between the two modes – as it might seem – since both confirm that in art it is essential to know how to see.

The video work Window open to a world was created in the personal rooms of the artist’s home: here, looking at the infinite veins of marble on the walls of the bathroom, he began to perceive forms, then to give them more definition, until he decided to make them emerge by drawing in pencil.

Certainly, the circumstances were essential for the process (quarantine created the necessary conditions for such concentration within a daily place) but more generally, it confronts the important question of creation and imagination: where do the images we contemplate in art come from? How much of their author’s interiority is there and how much of the external world is there?

Window open to a world opens up, revealing it, to the breadth of what happens inside us: the video, through a subdivision of the frame into three parts, shows the process of the appearance of forms starting from stone.

COVID 19 changed our lives in an instant. Decreasing the resources made available to create a work. But imagination, creativity are there, present. It is up to us to express them.

This video develops the idea that creativity can adapt to any medium. Succeed in looking at what you have in front of you. Not as an object that we perceive and know, but as a space for creation.

During confinement, my bedroom became my play space; my bathroom, especially with its marble tiles.

By observing them, without really looking at them. It’s here; that a whole world has appeared to me.

It is this window on a world which is then opened and revealed to me what was hitherto invisible.

Gaston Bachelard expresses it very well with this quote: “The imagination finds more reality in what is hidden than in what is shown”. The marble makes each piece unique, its areas of shadows and those lighter, its veins. These served as guidelines, to bypass the forms that this one revealed to me and which I have interpreted. What I would like this video to transmit, would be to allow people to open a window on their world, their creativity … their secret garden and succeed in bringing something out of themselves, and creating. It’s something beautiful. I like to believe that we can heal the soul with art. Just accept to open this window.