“I could spend hours watching people. There's a language in postures, which words sometimes even exploit,” offers David Zeller, alias ZED. Represented by 30-plus galleries and prestigious establishments in France,
Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, this behaviourist artist travels the world exhibiting Flexo, his acrylic-glass figure almost signage-like in silhouette, which portrays our everyday emotions and feelings through its endless array of poses. For last year's ArchiCOTE competition Zeller crafted a Flexo with arms raised to form a triangle above its head, christening it A Roof Over One's Head in reference to the devastating Aquila earthquake of 2009 and the shipwreck off Lampedusa in 2013. For this year's winners he has produced a vintage rust-effect version in the lineage of his most recent artworks.
Speaking with the human body
Driven by a need to create and express his sensibility concretely, “As a small boy I sculpted full-size bodies in the sand, and later my friends and I spent evenings modelling figures,” Zeller remembers. He went to live on Guadeloupe and there began carving busts and complete figures in wood, a bulimic passion that took over his life. To give his art a free reign he decided to move to Italy, after first visiting his native Alsace: “It was winter and
I didn't have a studio. I picked up some acrylic-glass offcuts from a neighbouring factory and created Flexo, with the idea of making art accessible to everyone.” Given its enthusiastic reception, Zeller developed an industrial cutting process for producing a basic figure that he could then thermoform manually, limb by limb, to create unique pieces.
Cut and folded steel
After chroming some models to make them shiny, this fan of vintage felt the urge to work in a totally different material; his steel Flexo now comes in three variants, chromed, vintage and brushed industrial with traces of impacts. “Acrylic glass is a very delicate, fluid, soft material, every gesture has to be controlled,” Zeller explains. “After five years working with it I'm now drawn strongly to metal, which reminds me of wood. I'm a perfectionist but I also like power that can be externalised.” These pieces are first cut out of solid steel then bent into shape using a blowtorch. Recently Zeller has been making increasingly large metal Flexos for outdoors and has in fact received his first public commission, for six 1.3m-tall figures to be installed along the Fil Rouge urban promenade in
his native Mulhouse.
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