"By embarking on an artistic journey in 2006, parallel to his profession as a psychologist, and undertaking work with metal, Jean-Charles Stora surely sought to shift his gaze toward other activities and challenges. Perhaps he viewed this shift as a form of rupture. However, looking at the pieces produced over these 19 years, one must acknowledge today that it was rather a continuity; for this artist has never truly ceased doing what he has always done in his life: meeting and understanding others, guiding them to understand the world, and making himself understood within it.
In this sense, understanding the world can only be a relational activity. Any comprehension claimed to be achieved in solitude, without others, is merely an illusion, nonsense, or delusion. To understand the world is to understand the other with whom we observe it and with whom we share its use. And to understand the other is to find an echo within them through the object we observe together, to share perceptions and emotions. Given the necessary shared vision of the object and the presence of the other’s gaze that it implies, art is therefore always a relationship.
It is within this continuity that Jean-Charles Stora creates and develops his work. His works make no claims; they propose no new ideas nor deliver symbols. Instead, they provoke our desire to understand, thereby compelling us toward relationship. The mobiles, large metal plates, or colored spheres arranged in his sculptures are real objects offered to our gaze, which only acquire meaning on the condition that we co-construct them together."
Gérard Renaudo
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