BANANAS (Art)

A while back on a shopping trip to Vannes we stumbled upon a rather lovely art installation, not just bananas, a plantation of banana trees (and some other foliage, in the window) and it was rather hard to take in that all of this was made of glass!

 

The artist is Marcoville - a tad pretentious going by a single name, as was the opening of the blurb to accompany the show; this unclassifiable artist does not exhibit! he grabs the eyes! Well no to be honest that wasn't pretentious it was absolutely true. The lighting made the pieces stunning and it was quite difficult to accept they were made from glass, I'd never seen it worked in such a way before.

 

The art is very decorative, he worked in 'decoration' of some kind not specified in his biography and then turned to making work from recycled items in the 70's, turning to glass in the 80's. He can certainly transform glass into fantastic, quite exuberant and playfully childlike pieces, palm and baobab style trees.

 

As an artist I'm usually only concerned with getting a piece of glass a metre square enclosed in a wooden frame to a gallery in the back of my car, so the thought of the transportation of these pieces is somewhat alarming. They have a great solidity and weight to the trunks, but the fronds of the palm branches would be an nightmare and as for one of those well endowed bunches of bananas falling from a tree - absolute nightmare. Typical of me that after the marvelling I come down to the practicalities.

Indeed at the end of the resume accompanying the show it says - very roughly translated from the French - he is each time the creative god and slave to the work of putting it in place.

And a final thought, how much do they cost??

 

Window display of vases of flowers - about 1.7 metres tall, I could see these by my indoor heated pool when I win the lottery.