Michel Rozier | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Michel grew up in his father’s woodworking workshop. Inspired by the working of materials, he chose metal as his own medium and worked with it for six years in a small workshop in Paris. Initially, metalwork was an opportunity for him to learn a trade and earning a living, but he knew all the while that he would one day come to art.\n At a young age Michel left a society that was too serious for him to spend his youth in Australia, which was full of adventure: crocodile hunting, the search for gold and opals, discovery of the Aboriginal culture ... This return to the essential supplied him with his main subject of inspiration: man versus nature. There he met his wife who would become a reference point in his life of adventure.\n However his home country, dear to his heart, had the culture and history necessary for his art and he decided to return to France to concentrate on artistic ironworking (sculptures of iron, copper, bronze) and start another life. Since there is a lack of space for him to express himself in color on sculptures, he chooses to make flat compositions on panels of iron.\n His paintings are sheets of rusted steel gilded with gold leaf or brass. Michel works with acids and encrusts collages of various materials (paper, fabric ...). He uses nitrates for color and creates his own hues. He produces chemical reactions by layering, washing and adding varnishes, which he then reworks incessantly. What the changes will be after the chemical reactions take place cannot be foreseen, and Michel loves this element of mystery and the uncontrolled in his work. He includes many inscriptions in his work to support his ideas, mostly of a nostalgia for a better time when humanity lived in harmony with nature. Michel tries to understand and reproduce the spirituality of our ancestors. As a reflection of this he uses civilization’s basic materials with ""primitive"" techniques.\n Michel follows in the footsteps of the legendary blacksmith sorcerer.