Roland Vincent, Jardin avec têtes de granit sculptées / Garden with carved granite heads

unless indicated otherwise, the pictures are 

courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her weblog

Sardent is a small community with about 800 inhabitants in the French department of Creuse in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. North-west of this community is a hamlet called Mont de Sardent (Hill of Sardent), surrounded by a wooded, hilly landscape, with many rock formations, as can be seen in a series of photos on the All Trails website

Roland Vincent in his garden (2021)

Life and works

This is the region where Roland Vincent (1948-2024) was born. Like his father and grandfather, he became a bricklayer.

In the early 1980s, when he was in his early thirties, he came up with the idea of collecting and processing the blocks of granite abundant in the environment.

For Vincent this processing of the found stones was mainly a matter of intuition. 

Characteristic of such an approach is that when considering a collected stone, the artist already envisions in his mind what would emerge from the material after processing. So it is not the artist who assigns the form to the stone, but rather the qualification of the stone that determines the final form.

The surrounding images show that each of the dozens of sculptures has its own appearance and that no two resemble each other. Some have hats on, but differ on other aspects, each sculpture has its own look in the eyes, some have the hands depicted, there are smaller and larger versions.....and so on.....

  

Working in this way, Vincent gradually created an extensive collection of sculptures, all of which got a pitch in the garden near his house.

Babòias

Around 1995, Roland Vincent started to create a completely different type of sculptures, which didn't get a place in the garden, but were collected in the garage of the house.

These sculptures were generally small in shape and were made by attaching grit and ancillary items to an infrastructure made of a variety of scrap materials, shaped into the appearance of the character envisioned.

The sculptures, which Vincent referred to as Babòias, look very different from the creations in the garden, as can be seen in the photo below by Bruno Montpied.

Some characters, in certain attire, look comical, others more homely, especially when fitted with domestic attributes, and still others are terrifying, especially those made almost entirely of granite. 

In the exhibitions to which Roland Vincent was invited (in 2013 at the town hall of Saint-Éloi and in 2018 at the Cécile Sabourdy museum in Vicq-sur-Breuilh) in addition to a single creation as included in the garden, mainly the Babòias were shown.

And then, a meeting that Jean-Bernard Philippot (of the theater company Nomades) had in 2010 with Ronald Vincent, during which Jean-Bernard saw the Babòias, resulted in a play Le petit peuple de pierre (The little stone people) in which these sculptures filled the stage (performed for the first time in 2011).

 picture (2005) by Bruno Montpied, from his weblog\

 

Roland Vincent passed away on April 26, 2024, at age 77.

Documentation

* article (July 2009) by Bruno Montpied on his weblog

* article (2018) reviewing Vincent's creations at the exhibition in Vicq-sur-Breuilh

* article (around 2011) by Jean-Bernard Philippot about the creation of the theatre play Le petit peuple de pierre  (The little stone people)

* article (July 2012) in regional journal La Montagne about the theater project with the Babòias

* article (March 2022) with a variety of photos by Sophie Lepetit on her weblog

Roland Vincent

Garden with carved granite heads

Le Mont-de-Sardent 

23250 Sardent, dept Creuse, region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France