Michel Rico (born In 1946) - Untitled, 1979

MICHEL RICO (b. 1946)
Untitled, 1979
Welded bronze proof with nuanced patina
Signed and dated on the reverse
Mounted on a natural wood base
50x 36 x 10 cm (19 ¼ x 13 ⅝ x 4 ½ in.)

This circular sculpture unfolds as a dense disc of rods, arranged in a tightly packed, radiating network emanating from a central core. The surface, largely covered in a nuanced brown-black patina, opens onto a burnished, gilded segment whose chromatic contrast animates the composition and underscores the opposition between raw and polished matter central to the artist's practice. The work rests on a rectangular natural wood base, consistent with the characteristic presentation of Rico's production of this period

Born in Biarritz in 1946, Michel Rico discovered metalwork as a child in Dieulefit, a material — steel, and later bronze — to which he would devote his entire career. Based successively on the Île-Saint-Germain and in Issy-les-Moulineaux before establishing his own studio-foundry in Échilleuses (Gâtinais region), he has exhibited under his own name since 1975. His work, born of a sustained search for balance between light, tension, and energy, explores themes of man, his relationship to the cosmos, and encounter — rendered through a welding gesture that lends the metal an almost organic freedom in space.

Dated 1979, the present work belongs to the first years of the artist's exhibited career, a formative period for the plastic vocabulary that would come to characterize his practice — the radiating accumulation of welded metal elements — later developed and amplified in more monumental works.