Objets placés selon les lois du hasard (Objects Placed According to the Laws of Chance)

German-French artist Jean Arp was a sculptor, painter and poet, in addition to a founding member of the Zurich Dada group in 1916. Arp’s work evokes the metamorphosis inherent in the cycle of life, the permanent process of transformation. As he himself wrote: “I don’t try to copy nature. I don’t want to reproduce it. I want to produce like a plant produces fruit…”. He was convinced that pure and new beauty is created when the artist loses control of his consciousness and gives himself over to automatic execution. Thus, he had a keen interest in the subconscious and experimented with different techniques and materials.

The series Objets placés selon les lois du hasard (Objects Placed According to the Laws of Chance), the first examples of which date back to 1917, evolved through the processes of Dada collages, which he sometimes made with his partner, the artist Sophie Taeuber, applied to three-dimensional creations. Arp saw chance as the main law, the one that contains all other laws. Forms arise by themselves and come about in drawing or sculpture and, naturally, in poetry, much in the same way as they arise in nature. To these ends, he used collage and assemblage techniques to randomly shape biomorphic figures made in wood and sitting atop a base made with the same material, combining these elements to form different configurations.



Carmen Fernández Aparicio