Statue created by Frédéric Bonneau, Guillaume Grégoire and Yann Lefeuvre, sculptors in Ancenis and Oudon.
Public statues can be found everywhere in our fair city. Whether they’re standing tall in squares, parks, or on top of public buildings, they watch us and communicate the messages and values their makers had imbued them with. But what would happen if they left their pedestals and shook up the town?
Olivier Texier devotes his time to drawing absurd illustrations and comics filled with bizarre and unreasonable characters. Armed with only a pencil and a battalion of sculptors, he plays a game of “copying” some of our statues to a life-size scale of 1:1, thus freeing Generals Cambronne and Mellinet from their martial posturing. He also offers the feminine allegories of Nantes and the Loire a chance to come down from their monumental fountain in Place Royale and discover a city and river they’ve been embodying for nearly 160 years.
Allégorie de la Loire
Ducommun du Locle, 1865, bronze, foundry: Voruz, Nantes
On the lower tier of the monumental fountain in Place Royale, and facing in the same direction as the allegory of Nantes, another woman represents the Loire this time. Sitting, and also in drapery, she leans on two jugs pouring water into the Erdre and Sèvre rivers.
Olivier Texier was born in 1972 in Nantes, where he lives and works. He has collaborated with almost all French-language graphic novel publishers, from Les Requins Marteaux to Delcourt, by way of Cornélius and Le Dernier Cri.