Xavier Carrère

Born in 1966, in Draguignan (France) in 1966
Lives and works in the Landes region of France

A sculptor in glass and metal, Xavier Carrère likes to work with elementary curved forms, which he combines in a play of transparency with light and opacity. His monumental garden sculptures and interior decorations are a humble, sensory tribute to materials and the beauty of color.  

He began working with molten glass with his uncle, master glassmaker Robert Pierini, before training in blown glass techniques. While he imagines simple, colorful forms for his outdoor sculptures, Xavier Carrère also combines glass with metal, concrete and burnt wood. Sometimes it's units of color and lines of metal that seem to soar into the sky in music, in an aesthetic that may echo the lyrical abstraction of Vassily Kandinsky. As in the drawings of this modern painter, Xavier Carrère's sculptures play with voids around solid forms, so that colors float in the air. Sometimes, too, this glass craftsman abandons his principal medium to sculpt solely in metal. He then organizes the meeting of monumental curved pieces by playing on material contrasts. A universe that Xavier Carrère also deploys for interiors in the form of wall lamps, headboards and tables, designed to embellish everyday life, and which he presents in his vast showroom in Magescq. During his residency in Biot, he chose to bring out of the molten material elements of an answer to a question: if you were to shape an ideal universe, what would it look like? From his Big Bang, personal galaxies emerged in a magma of different colored glasses.