Career

Born in Périgueux in 1962, Denis Monfleur spent his childhood in Paris and then Nogent-sur-Marne, where he began sculpting by modelling clay. At eighteen he worked as a labourer in the Paris press.

Self-taught, he gave up clay and plaster — too costly to cast — to devote himself fully to sculpture. The mayor of Fontenay-sous-Bois secured him a studio at the Maison pour tous Gérard-Philipe, where he carved marble and wood; he exhibited there for the first time in 1986.

In 1989 the sculptor José Subirà-Puig hired him as a carving practitioner; he later worked for Dietrich-Mohr and Marcel Van Thienen. In 1995, shortlisted for the Fénéon prize, he was injured carrying a piece: laid up, he turned to granite, more austere and more weather- and pollution-resistant than marble.

Sources

• Philippe Dagen, « Des heures de réflexion avant de frapper quatre coups sur un bloc de granit », Le Monde, 2010
• France 3 Paris Île-de-France, « Du miniature au monumental : rencontre avec Denis Monfleur », 2019

Direct carving and materials

Monfleur's work is based on the direct carving of hard stone, often on a monumental scale. The technique demands a final gesture: the artist removes matter, with no going back.

From the marble and wood of his early years he moved to granite in 1995, then to ever-harder rocks — magmatic stone, columnar basalt, diorite. After joining the Galerie Claude Bernard in 2010 he introduced colour and enamelling. In 2020 he spent the lockdown in a Puy-de-Dôme quarry that extracts the lava blocks he had been working for a decade.

Sources

• Philippe Dagen, « La surprenante légèreté des granits de Monfleur », Le Monde, 2010
• France 3 Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, « Un sculpteur vit le confinement dans une usine du Puy-de-Dôme », 2020

Style and series

Monfleur's language is figurative and places the human figure at its centre, with a universal dimension. For the critic Olivier Cena (Télérama), "when Denis Monfleur carves his heads and figures in basalt, he expresses his vision of man […] the contradictions, the violence and the poetry, the selfishness and the bursts of generosity".

His work unfolds in series of directly carved pieces — Vanités, Désaxés, Dancers, Seated figures, Meninas… The Individus series brings together nearly three hundred lava figures, all different, gathered on a single base to form a work "in permanent development", added to at each showing.

Sources

• Olivier Cena, Télérama (cité par l'article Wikipédia)
• Béatrice de Rochebouët, « Avec ses totems monumentaux, Denis Monfleur rend hommage à la Bretagne », Le Figaro, 2018

Monumental works and recognition

Monfleur exhibits in France and abroad: a tribute to the Jewish deportees in Thessaloniki, Creator Vesuvio in Herculaneum, Une rencontre granitique in the gardens of the Gallimard publishing house. In 2014 he created El Atlante del Cerro in Uruguay and exhibited thirty works made on site.

In 2016 he was made a Knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and installed L'Apporteur de l'espoir in front of the Gare d'Austerlitz, in tribute to the International Brigades. In 2021, four monumental granite heads were shown on the Place Vendôme. In April 2023, twelve "Monumentales" were installed across Bordeaux (the "L'art dans la ville" programme), ahead of the exhibition "Denis Monfleur. Peuples de pierre" at the Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts (2 June 2023 – 7 January 2024).

Sources

• « L'Apporteur de l'espoir, une œuvre de Denis Monfleur », Paris la douce, 2022
• Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, « Les Monumentales de Denis Monfleur »
• Ministère de la Culture, « Nomination dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, janvier 2016 »