Stefan Rinck's stone figures form a motley and comical community of for the most part animals, as well as chimeras and monsters. They wear costumes and masks and are endowed with particular symbols or characteristics; some bear the names of heroes of Greek mythology. Together, they make up a discordant but related assembly of non-humans, coming from elsewhere, an archaic imaginary world, woven from myths and legends. With this collection of fauna, the artist is exploring a comical, imaginary yet realistic vein, breathing new life into its iconography, using a technique typical of the Middle Ages: sculpting his figures directly from stone.

These carved rocks stand proudly upright: vertical islets, true to the native stone from which they have been extracted, imposing themselves through their sheer presence. For this exhibition in the Tuileries Gardens, Stefan Rinck rises to the challenge of size and his sculptures almost reach three meters in height, in proportion with the permanent sculptures in this former royal park. The primitive manner in which the material has been worked shows though in their raw and even rough appearance.  Traces of percussive blows are apparent and incisions are sometimes aggressive, particularly in the hard marble. The artist seeks to express himself through depth in the same way as an engraver uses lines and strokes. So, is Rinck taking us back to the Stone Age? Yes, in the sense that sculpting directly from stone implies a certain relationship to the material, the physical gesture and the tools employed.

With their individuality and powerful characterization, Rinck's sculptures remind us of the figures of Roman art, which populate the columns and tympana of churches. They share the same morphology and style, as well as the hybrid aspect of the chimera and monster with their grimacing facial expressions; they are also endowed with the telluric density of the gnome. These are grotesque figures, in which we recognize the vitalist comedy typical of medieval realism, which could be observed during the parades of jesters and buffoons at religious and popular festivities. The use of parody, which in those times permitted an inversion of common values and ecclesiastical and social hierarchies, also characterizes Rinck's art, with its atmosphere of masquerade and transgressive excess reminding us of the Feast of Fools.

Yet if the Middle Ages seem to color Rinck's art, its frame of reference in fact crystalizes around a number of 'Gothic' obsessions of the Romantic kind: a taste for mythology and folk tales, for different epochs and cultures, for the fantastic or figures of hubris and excess. His creatures travel through time and space, spawning and forming hybrids with their Aztec, Inca, Amerindian, African, Pacific and European counterparts. The presence of Rinck's sculptures in the Tuileries Gardens might provoke a somewhat odd exchange with the classical sculptures and those of Maillol but no more so than the animalistic and primal sculptures of wild beasts grappling with their prey, such as Tigresse terrassant un crocodile (1869) by Auguste Nicolas Caïn or Le lion au serpent (1833) d'Antoine-Louis Barye.