(Circle of) Jan Weesop Furniture

A strong and spectacular metal cactus, contemporary brutalist sculpture, unique piece by artist ESOJ, France 2020. We represent ESOJ and organized his exhibition "Metal Spirit", November 2022, in our gallery in Paris, and this unique piece was presented during this event. Esoj's work is rooted in a direct link to daily life, to the visual value of consumer objects. Whether they are elements of nature or products of pop culture, he fixes them in the metal to give them a definitive appearance, a form of immortality: a box of opened chocolates will be there forever, nothing will not erase Mickey's sluggish smile, nor his middle finger; a succulent plant frozen in iron will no longer need water... A parallel world under construction, a world of avatars springing from a metallic quintessence which confronts man with himself, with matter, with progress, to the flow of time. Beyond their symbolic force, Esoj's sculptures express as much the visceral gesture of the artist in a world losing meaning, as they catalog his universe in a subjective archive. For his first collaboration with us, Esoj looks away from his Barbie dolls, Playmobils and bags of M&Ms, to sketch a sort of return to Nature and vibrate an ancestral wisdom evident in his new series of cacti, succulents, vases and masks murals with shamanic connotations. A wisdom that he draws from his Portuguese origins, this saudade: “tension between opposites, on the one hand the feeling of a lack, on the other hand the hope and the desire to find what we lack”, embodied here by a particularly inhabited desert; where cacti are next to agaves, aloes, prickly pears, plants which are certainly ornamental but also hallucinogenic and healing, sometimes fatal; where the series of containers suggests an almost medicinal link between these inert objects, even more obvious in the wall piece inspired by Korean shaman...