Gilles Brusset

Gilles BRUSSET creates ephemeral or perennial artistic projects through public or institutional commissions. He works in Paris in the Belleville district and, in conjunction with his artistic activity, conducts master works in gardens and public spaces. Graduated from the Schools of Architecture of Paris Belleville and Versailles, he creates works that articulate differentiated fields (landscapes, architectures, town planning, engineering).

An Artistic Approach

Art in the landscape – Soliciting a sensitive perception, without mediation, the works are apprehended with simplicity. The gaze of observers is engaged, placed at the center of a sensitive world revealed and interpreted from the angle of specific view of the artist. The physical world is envisaged as a vast sculpture. Each place is a potential work of art in dormancy, awaiting revelation. Works are not objects in themselves, but rather instruments of optics that give the framework of the physical world to be read.

Works in situ – The works deployed in the landscapes are specific to the situation, the history and the symbolism of the places. The use of metal profiles for “open sculpture” in social housing in Gennevilliers, the crude stone crust by the sculpture “Las Piedras del Cielo” for the artistic 1% of the Pablo Neruda school group in Poitiers, Asphalt and grass for the landscape sculpture “Enfance du pli” on a public square in Meyrin, Switzerland, each time reflects the specificities of the context for in situ projects.

Art in urban planning – Integrated into the pre-operational phase, works of art anticipate and prefigure. In the manner of a model scale 01, they carry out constructions of architectural and landscape intentions, elements of programs or principles of development. The “Banc-Paysage”, a 70-meter-long planted and sculpted bench in Bezons since 2014, demonstrates in vivo that the rapid and inexpensive introduction of temporary elements makes it possible to test in situ and in vivo, the elements sketched “indoors”.

The time of the site becomes a lived time of the suggested developments. Rather than being a factor of nuisance and embarrassment, it is the occasion for a collective adventure. For example, the anamorphoses of the sculpture-landscape “Tranches de Ville” and the kaleidoscopic points of view proposed by the Passages project in Clichy-la-Garenne allow everyone to appropriate the symbolic and imaginary stakes of architectural and urban projects.

Buildings or infrastructures devoted to demolition, fallow plots or public spaces in the making, are opportunities to build specific artistic projects that will allow the cultural facts that are the construction of urban spaces and landscapes to come As such in the eyes of everyone.

The Third Train

The Armistice glade, in the Forest of Compiègne is one of the most significant sites of World War One. The Armistice was signed there, on the 11th of November 1918, in a rail coach, today worldwide known.

The garden of the third train, designed by the landscaper Marc Blume, the artist Gilles Brusset and the architect Francesca Liggieri is a Franco-German project taking place around the allee joining the parking to the glade, making it a memorable walk before discovering the location of the Armistice.

Inside the undergrowth, the three designers thought about a symbolic and plastic parallel between the trails of the trenches of the Great War and the shapes drawn by the filaments of the mycelium network. Following this pattern, the paths of the garden make their way windingly through the foliage, creating rounded and planted areas where different essences of the forest can be seen. Adding itself to this maze leading to the discovery of the undergrowth, an elongated bench crosses the garden and invites contemplation.

The garden of the third train is an undergrowth garden which embraces the vastness of humus. It takes on the perception of the visitors through their movement in space and encourages the discovery of a peaceful place by offering new, wringely and random paths.

He takes place as a third component between the trees and the people: a link that associates contemplation, meditation and celebration of life.

France | 2019 | Photography: Pierre-Yves Brunaud

“Etoile de terre” (Earth star)

The ” Earth star ” is a sculpture-landscape installed in the garden of the French Embassy in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince. The work of successive developments with the engineer Pompidou Dorval and his Haitian teams have resulted in this “magical work”, living form lurking in the field.

Art, landscape, architecture – Since André Le Nôtre, French landscape architects have been trying to build garden architecture as carefully as architects wear to buildings. Art has been integrated into both, with, for example, statuary or sculptural boundaries. By choosing to invest the soil of the entrance sequence, the artistic project is part of a tradition of art in gardens and manifested in a French spirit: readable and clear compositions, scheduling able to co-exist in a mutual benefit architecture, landscape and works of art.

Haiti, inspiring forms – A selection of forms of the Haitian landscape serve as a plastic matrix. Geographical figures or plant typologies of Haiti are a formal vocabulary of inspiration for the work. The coastlines, the tree structures of the mangrove roots or the forms of the Caribbean Echinoderms draw a plastic anchor to be reinterpreted by the artistic project. Among the profusion of Haitian forms, Gilles Brusset has retained the family of the outline of things, the border of the surfaces, the design of the edges. Often the forms stretch out and extend in bypasses, flaring out in prolific excrescences.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti | 2018 | Photography: Michel Denancé, Valérie Baeriswyl, P. Lefebvre, Gilles Brusset

“L’enfance du pli” (Fold’s childhood)

The Fold’s childhood is a sculpture-landscape, monumental and elongated in the land of the place called Boudines. Its forms are an interpretation of the force that spawned landscapes of the Jura massif (Jura folds).

The site involves – The principle of the sculpture-landscape of the fold’s childhood is that of the inscription of one landscape in another. On the one hand, the site is involved in its physical dimension, and on the other hand in its geographical dimension at the territorial scale. Existing site features (straight lines) are exacerbated by the contrasting effect of the inscription of the sculpture-landscape (curves).

Games of space and time – From the heights, one can see the Fold’s childhood as a picture evocative of the folded and undulating landscapes of the Jura, a model imaginary site of the mountains lying. It is a set of shapes that can also be travelled, paced. The spatiality of the fold offers the children a physical experience of the curve and a variety of situation differentiated in the space of the pleated floor.

Art and landscape – The fold’s childhood is a work of art carved in the field of Meyrin-park. Located between the park and the buildings, between architecture and landscape, it questions the status of art in public space and landscape as a work of art. Designed with the tools of the landscaper, the work implicitly poses the question of the part of creation that can involve the profession of a landscaper.

Geneva, Switzerland | 2017 | Photography: Pierre-Yves Brunaud, Binocle

Slices of The City – a landscape sculpture

Optimism of the decompartmentalization – ‘Slices of The City’ is a project which is a matter of the architecture, the sculpture, the landscape, the town planning and the art. It accompanies the urban project of city entry of Clichy, settles down on the site for a duration of 2 years, further to which it will be demolished.

Town planning – The Clichy’s block completed – The dimensions and the forms of the project directly arise from masses built by the urban fabric a clear global shape which it restores. All in one piece on linear 30 meters, the project is an urban facade which constitutes a contemporary sequence of the street Martre.

Art: sculpture kinetics / optical machine – The project is also a kinetic sculpture which recomposes the figure of the existing blind wall by a set of homothéties. The centers of homothéties being placed at the level of the eye, various figures appear, according to the movements of the observers. In the night, reflectors set up on slices diffract the lights of the lighthouses of cars and transfigure the project in bright and kinetic sculpture.

Symbol: mutations – The «slices of city» project, as the deployment of the iconic figure of the Parisian suburb that is the blind wall, symbolize the current mutation and the current dynamics in the work in the city of Clichy (reduction of the unhealthy housing environments, the construction of equipment and new housing, buildings of offices and activity, standing public places, etc.).

France | 2014 | Photography: Pierre-Yves Brunaud

The Flying Stones

The “flying stones” are suspended in a private maquis garden, on the west coast of Corsica. 33 elements for a sculpture-landscape on the Mediterranean horizon. The pebbles, rolled by the sea, have gone up the coast and rise towards the sky.

Arranged in the sky like musical notes, they punctuate the space with their rounded densities. During strong winds, they move insubstantially and collide in music. The oscillation of the stones makes this work a hypnotic instrument. It offers long hours of contemplation, listening to conversations: the stones discuss day and night.

Work is an optical instrument that gives the framework of the physical world to be read. From stone to stone, the gaze is led from the interior of the garden to the horizons of the Mediterranean sea.