Florian Baudrexel

Since the early 2000s, Florian Baudrexel has worked primarily with recycled cardboard. This common, found material becomes the starting point for his sculptures. Lightweight and easy to cut and transform, cardboard allows him to add to and build shapes.

For Baudrexel, sculpture does not begin with a specific idea. It emerges from the very process of working with the material. Fragments, sometimes from previous works, circulate in the studio, combining and shifting around until they gradually find their place in a new composition.

Technically, cardboard often imposes a logic close to geometry: planes, edges, volumes. However, the artist does not construct according to strict calculations. Rhythms appear in the repetition of cuts, in the gradual assembly of elements. Two shapes can suddenly produce an image, a posture, a body, a gesture, before simply becoming volumes again.

This moment is of particular interest to the artist: when abstraction, almost by accident, becomes suggestive. As if two blocks placed together could seem to kneel, lean, or kiss. Sculpture then consists of capturing this moment and fixing it in space.

The choice of cardboard also has a broader dimension. As a material that has been used and is destined for recycling, it already has a history. For the artist, working with it also means not adding unnecessarily to the mass of waste produced by the art world. But this ecological awareness is less a subject than a way of working: an attention to the material, its availability, and its life before and after the work.

Florian Baudrexel's sculptures oscillate between construction, intuition, and architecture. Simple forms compose structures in which we can sometimes recognize something, before the material, rhythm, and balance take over.