The fisherman's corner, Daniel Nadaud, 1990

Fishing rods, fishing line, shell casing/ Gift of the artist

Daniel Nadaud builds his work around everyday objects that have lost their usefulness, and combining them in his installations and sculptures gives them a new meaning. To this day, few of the pieces produced by Daniel Nadaud depart from reinvented memories. The use of found or second-hand objects tinges the artist's work with an intimacy and an old-fashioned familiarity due to the traces of time. Most of the time linked to childhood memories, Daniel Nadaud sees his pieces as the transcription and evocation of periods of uncertainty shared between the city and the countryside.

Fisherman's Corner, created in 1990, is a direct reference to the frog fishing the artist practised as a child. This activity, at once peaceful and cruel, enabled him to highlight the great ambiguity of nature (and a fortiori of the countryside), which always oscillates between a place of calm and peaceful beauty and a theatre of great horrors and acts of cruelty. Through its frail architecture, Fisherman's Corner takes the form of a kind of metaphorical trap - not far removed from the spider's web. The tension between the different faces of nature is echoed in the tension between the strings of fishing rods, all attached to a 75 mm shell casing. This object is like a threat within the piece, a discreet but disturbing reminder of the impact of the First World War on the countryside: half-buried and as if pulled out of the ground by the fishing rods, it evokes the post-war tragedies caused by the explosion of shells lost in the ploughing and activated by the ploughshare.

With its evocation of the horrors hidden behind an enchanting nature, Le Fisherman's Corner delivers the same message and draws on the same atmosphere as Dormeur du Val by Rimbaud, but also the literary work of memory by Maurice Gennevoix. The shell casing is also a reminder of how families faced with the discovery of industrial residues from the war have reused them both functionally and commemoratively. Daniel Nadaud spent part of his childhood some thirty kilometres from Piacé.

Every year since 2012, it has brought together in 1 booklet of 32 pages named after the Fisherman's Corner; Fisherman's Notebook, memories of the region. Part diary, part collection of rural tales, the Cahiers reflect the destination of the Fisherman's CornerThrough his childhood memories, Daniel Nadaud gives a more global and multifaceted view of the countryside. Fisherman's Corner is also a highly graphic work: the thin fishing rods and their lines cut through the landscape, blurring the viewer's perception of it, while their very contours are difficult to grasp thanks to the play of red and black stripes. The optical confusion created in the viewer by the shape and colours of the piece makes it a kind of vibrant, extremely ethereal sculpture.

Text by Roma Lambert