« We have outgrown ornament: we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament, » the purist architect Adolf Loos wrote in the late 1920s. « Invention of new ornaments is unable to pleasure a cultural man. » But unlike Loos, the ornament doesn’t bother Axel Gouala. You could even say it brings him so much pleasure, that he is engaged with it throughout his oeuvre.

Gouala understands ornament mainly as a fragment of a whole: a neglected detail of a Baroque sculpture, plunged down under layers of more significant elements; acanthus leaves made unimportant by the monumentality of a Corinthian column; a single wave among thousands of other similar ones amidst a stormy sea or a mountain towering over the empty horizon. Gouala notices the neglected ornament, emancipates it, passing on from ornaments in the natural world to the ones in the world of art. He gives them space, lets them talk and vacates the scene for them. He gains independence for the ornament, saying: you yourself can be a sculpture if you dare! And thus, less than a hundred years after the opening

words of this text were spoken, instead of yearning for the destruction of ornament, Gouala is longing for its rebirth: « Nature creates random shapes, but some of them are special, worthy of representation. Animals, plants and elements remind us of something from our distant past, something that deeply and in a primitive way connects with the ground, and that fascinates me. »

Loos considered ornament to be obsolete and was refusing to look into the past. He was trying to find accurate morphology of shapes actual for the time being. Gouala, perhaps in opposition to him, goes back down into history of the ornament, searching, remodeling, making it visible.

« The man of today uses or discards ornaments of old or exotic cultures as he sees fit. He concentrates his ingenuity and ability for higher things”, says Loos, and I think that they might understand each other in some ways.

Curator at Meetfactory
Kotska Gallery
Prague, Czech Republic

Axel Gouala comprend l’ornementation comme fragment d’un corps plus grand : détails perdus dans le foisonnement d’une sculpture baroque ; feuilles d’acanthes rendues insignifiantes par la monumentalité d’une colonne corinthienne; vague unique au milieu d’une mer agitée, ou montagne dominant l’horizon vide. A. Gouala s’attarde sur l’ornement négligé, cherchant à l’émanciper de sa fonction décorative, passant des références du monde naturel à l’ornementation comme œuvre d’art. Il leur offre une tribune, un espace où ils peuvent s’exprimer de manière libre, leur accordant l’importance d’une sculpture en soi.

Ainsi, moins d’un siècle après que les premiers mots du texte d’Adolf Loos aient été formulés*, plutôt que la disparition et la négation de l’ornementation, Axel Gouala appelle à une forme de renaissance : « L’ornementation nous rappelle quelque chose de notre passé lointain, quelque chose qui nous connecte de manière profonde et primitive avec le sol, qui me fascine.»

extrait du texte inaugural de l’exposition Inner than the Bone

(traduit de l’anglais)

*Ornement and Crime, Adolf Loos.

Curatrice à la Meetfactory
Kotska Gallery
Prague, République Tchèque