Fernand Garanto, Jardin de sculptures / Sculpture garden

all images courtesy of Donminque Clement

The garden with sculptures reviewed in the following article is located in Limoux, a municipality with approximately 10,500 inhabitants in the Aude department in the Occitanie region of France.

Lifen and works

The sculptures are creations made by Fernand Garanto, who was born iin Limoux in the late 1940s.

His career was initially quite remarkable, for when he was only sixteen years old, he became a professional stuntman, part of one of the biggest teams in France at the time.

He would be active there for a long time, but after twenty years and many broken bones, he had to quit.

His next job, which he started in the mid-1980s, was much more subdued, as he became a civil servant at the municipality of Limoux. Although that was a much quieter environment, he could still occasionally express himself as a boisterous character, especially during Carnival.

And as a self-taught artist, he also developed a passion for creating sculptures.

By then he was married, and the couple lived outside the center of Limoux in a house with a garden of about 3,000 square meters, which,certainly after his retirement around 2014,  began to be filled with his creations, as in part can be seen in part in the surrounding images.

They show sculptures made of terracotta, plaster, and white cement with marble dust.

Garanto's  studio is completely filled with all kinds of sculptures and he gladly accepts requests from friends to create sculptures displaying specific types of people.

As a self-taught artist, he is sometimes amazed by what comes from his hands, such as his ability to capture certain gestures in his creations.

He has also established himself as a writer by now, like in March 2024, he published a book entitled Entre Action et Passion: mémoires d'un cascadeur professionnel (Between Action and Passion: Memoirs of a Professional Stuntman), that reveals the secrets of the techniques and methods stunt performers use to achieve breathtaking feats safely.

Documentation

* Garanto on Facebook

* Article (Januarfy 2019) in French newspaper l'Indepandant

* Article  (October 2024) in French newspepr Le Petit Journal

Video

On YouTube Fernand Garanto has a collection of some eight short videos that give an impression of the kind of creations he makes.

* Here is a video (3.03 minutes) from this collection, made in 2018 at the occasion of the Carnaval de Limoux

Fernand Garanto 

Sculpture Garden

17 Chemin de la Serre de Cournanel 

11300 Limoux, dept Aude, region Occitanie, France