I have always been an extremely rigourous feltow : the main way relate with the world is through reverie (almost an anagram of the French word for glassworking "verrerie" or travelling, that interior rambling that I practice assiduously, ignoring the jibes of those annoying advocates of stakhanovism, well-meaning puritans and other moratists. So what if I didn't want to "shake up nonchalance " ? Please note that reverie has nothing to do with dreaming "Reverie is the actual exercise of rigour. It is the key to present temporality, with no room for nostalgia or vain anticipation, while dreams generally exclude any deliberate actions and have no notion of lime. Reverie should be considered as an artistic production in itself.

This exhibition ix entitled Crossover. It is the result of my reverie-cum-rambling-cumresidency in Sars Poteries in the Autumn of 2002, and is a collection of objects that bear witness of this passage. Over-prosumptious, I wanted to hase a go at the unknown. I tried, perhaps over-cautiously, to produce crossdisciplinary. ludic art that resulted from a thought, a certain spontaneity, the pleasure of the act and the qualities of the material, while taking care to avoid its facile effects. Art that conveyed a certain 'sensuatity of the intelligence', a reverie to be shared in tact. But it is perhaps just simply a puzzle.

The voiles (sails) are among the first pieces I made. The fruit of a spontaneous desire, with no real justification, they probably symbolize the vehicle of this mapless voyage, or better, of this treasure hunt. Ahoy, Red Rackham ! Ahoy, Long John Silver! Ahoy, Corto Maltese! Why are there five of them? Because I don't like even numbers and because I broke two of them.
Five is a good number : it reminds me of S, the second most used letter in the french langage but the unquestîonable "yellow jersey" in Perec's "The Void". Why put a black sail in the group? Note that it is heading in the opposite direction to the other four and we always need an ugly duckting in a story worth its saIt. Because what we have here is a story, a sort of fairy tale. A story told through a seriesof glass objects, in which scraps play the leading role, and works on paper, the hya/ograms and shadowgraphs in the fashion of counterpoint.

What I call a hyalogram is the result of an educational game that was originally intended to show children how molten glass behaves under tho effect of gravity : "it makes funny pictures when we let it run onto the ground; it looks like writing, but we can't keep il because it is too fragile and il breaks, so we throw it away: its a pity" they say. I wanted to keep the trace ot this fragile and ephemeral writing. As a close pyromaniac, like most of us, I like to play with fire. This is how the first hyalograms were made : we let a trickle of glass run onto a piece of water-soaked paper, where it leaves its imprint by burning th surface of the paper and producing an image which the viewer cant help comparing to calligraphy. This process has gradually become one of my teaching aids, enabling the student to actually feel the vîscosily oft the glass, control of which is the very essence of glassworking, and to use it to produce an elementary visual object. Little by little, it has become part of my own artistic practices. Where the medium becomes the tool, the glass imprints on paper like light on a film. It leaves its mark, wounding, scarring, mutilating, talooing it - yes, tatooing it ! Thee paper, the epidermus, offers itself up to caresses and to burns. The work here is left with a scar, a double memento of the performance - the action of the body which presides over the act - and that of the tool, a future scrap of glass, condemned to disappear as soon as it has served its purpose. The hyalogram is the materialization of technical memory.

The shadows speak for themselves ; minimalistic glass objects, the scrap of glass and its burnt image : the hyalem. But let's get back to pirates. There really is a hidden treasure among the exhibits : 613 transparent flames, carefully placed inside an illuminated box. (You can count them, there are exactly 613.) With the maps to find them : Le récit des marrons mal mutés (decipher that if you can !). And the three ink bottles that contained lhem. And a headstone, marking the place where the treasure is buried. And two boxes containing secrets : les écrins à chimère A. (Another one lo decipher !) You can easily see that this could be a story about corsairs! We have aIl the right ingredients. It is however up to you to imagine another way of interpreting it. You may say "Your treasure is nothing but a pile of scrap ! Really, just bits of glass !" So what ? Ask children visiting a glassworks what they are really interested in, what they would like to take home with them. It's in the bins ! The booty they want is no less than theese little bits of nofhing, worthless, abandoned scraps, magnificent scraps whose worth is lost to adults, but which children can still perceive. Offcuts, shards and strings of glass that run naturally onto the ground : worthless glass ! So I worked with these outcast, scraps and hyalograms, I wanted to restore their dignity by giving them the leading role, showing off their intrinsic beauty, like when, with a wave of a magic wand, a toad is transformed into a Prince Charming at the end of the story. There you are - I have put this scrap in the limelight : vetro povera.

But read on and you may look at these scraps, jewels among these untouchable nothings, with fewer preconceptions. It is a recent thesis written by a group of researchers who, quite properly, wish to remain anonymous, and to whom we will give the last word.

"What is a scrap? First of all, it is a by-product of a craft. In glassworking jargon, the French word for to trim, "rogner" (from the low latin rotundiare) means to cut around the neck of a blown object, without deforming it, in order to remove any imperfections and obtain a regular rim.

So the "rognure" or scrap of glass, is effectively a waste product. This corresponds to the dictionary definitions given by the three main French dictionaries .

We must however point out that the dictionaries cited base their definitions on later latin etymology. While rotundiare in low latin, or popular latin, effectively means "to cut around, the scrapped part", this is a degeneration of the classic latin rotundare which on the contrary means to make a round shape, to round off or to complete. It is of course this latter definition to which adheres the Ars Rotundare et Tacere (whose acronym ART is nowadays singularly bandied about) meaning literally the art of making a round shape and keeping quiet. We mention it here, for simplicity's sake, under the somewhat reductive name "L'Art de la Rognure" (The Art of the Scrap)..

These three respectable lexical institutions thus imply that a "rognure" is a déchet d'oeuvre (you have to pronounce this aloud to get the pun), while on the contrary, as we have understood, it is one of the true "chefs d'oeuvre" of glassworking, miles away from the Portland Vase and other " Cage-Cups"

Unfortunately, neither the academic establishment nor the obtuse practitioners of glass art, most being over-talkative victims of the paperweight syndrome, have never accepted this meaning, being devoid of the necessary humility and clairvoyance to understand it. In the field of blown glass, contrary to their proselyte assertions (when speaking as the "converted"), the real work of art is not at all the sophisticated, baroque object, overblown with its own importance, or the kitsch vase, multicoloured, sugar-iced and pretentious, that we put in the lehr to subject it to slow cooling, before exhibiting it before the wide-eyes of a naïve audience, generally the same as those who believe television commercials. The true work of art is that precious scrap of glass that falls and lies modestly on the floor after being trimmed. So-called glass art compared to this scrap, is however what the garden gnome is to Rodin's sculptures. We are in the presence of a tradition and practice that is age-old, yet clandestine, that the dominant ideology has always stigmatized, disregarded and kept in the wings. This scrap is however the work of a virtuoso, the fruit of a long life of ascetism. The philistine would assume that it is the fruit of chance. On the contrary, it is the result of an almost religious act, a ritual that consists in extracting the sublime part from a banal and insignificant volume. Only to keep the essence, to express the precious curl among all others, whose shape depends on the virtuosity of the master in marrying the viscosity of the material to the force of gravity, the velocity of his gesture to the sureness of its execution, the inner force to the softness of his touch; in a word, to celebrate in the act, the marriage of opposing forces and to unite them in a radious result.

In the glass-blowing technique, it is the volume from which the scrap is removed that is discarded, not the contrary. This is something that the initiated alone know, while the vulgar, strangely enough the glassworker, generally lacks the necessary subtlety, delicacy and refinement for perceiving things oriental which he sometimes qualifies disparagingly as "chinese curio". Concentration, learning, repetition: trimming glass is zen.

The Rognure (scrap) has a highly spiritual value, yet is also secular in nature. We do not produce a piece of scrap, we accomplish it. It is the pretext for and the vehicle of two types of meditation: the first in movement, in the act of doing, the second in stillness, in the moment of contemplation that follows, prolongs and motivates its realization. Ephemeral contemplation during which the enthusiast will delight in their sublime irridescence and the prodigious simplicity of their minimalist forms.

A modest expression of thrifty (or minimalist ??) art, "scrap" (waste?) represents the very essence of glass: denudation, absence. Ecce vitrum.