The sculptor with a chainsaw.
Photographer, documentary filmmaker, has not been any sense of professional art training, Roland Cros. Using the chain saw carving in the wood directly on the way to make these large pieces of wood to be reborn.
For him, more the tool is unrefined and the material unwilling, more the pattern escapes from the willingness and more the representation fades for the benefit of chance. It is then that the graphic surprises of this organized loss of control build themselves . From an inert plank sluggish appear some characters who maybe was only waiting for the blade of the chainsaw to show themselves to us. Silhouettes which arise from an expressionist universe: dancers hesitating between grace and torture, faces between grimaces and hearty laugh, between pain and surprise. Here it is question of the wandering solitary human beings anxiety at night, in front of tragic in the world. Cros is moreover situated in the filiation of the great German engravers of the interwar period: Beckman, Dix and particularly Grosz, but also of the Mexican José Guadalupe Posada or still of the precursor of the graphic novel, the Belgian Frans Maserel, every artists engaged in the fights of their time.
To achieve his work require echnology very simple and quick, focused some of the old wood waste, together with the wood debris and old glossy patina on the wood,brush a layer of dark print on the side of it,then paint all the exaggerated lines which need to be carved by the chalk, sometimes only lightly swept surface, and sometimes you need to have strength and skill of the knife carve meandering lines,here,the vitality and spontaneous it’s part of artistic inspiration.
In the abandoned and neglected material give the birth to those vivid characters which attract our attention, and those who like us have a the same destiny of suffering and sorrow will sympathize us a lot.