(Nice 1928–2005 New York)
La Bien Gardè / J'ai un Secret, 1997, signed and numbered III/IV, sliced bronze statue with welded locks, 190 x 67 x 57 cm
Produced by Fonderia Arte F. lli Bonvicini Somma Campagna

This work is number III/IV from an edition of 8 + IV A.P.
This work is accompanied by a photo certificate signed by the artist

This work is recorded in the Arman Studio Archives New York under number: APA# 8309.97.010

Provenance:
JZ Art Trading, Milan
European private collection

Note:
The lock boxes naturally vary between each example from this cast as per the artist's original intention

Also in Fernandez Arman’s work we find the need to preserve and conserve, but in this case the aesthetic-rational component is sacrified in the subliminal and emotional moment of the relationship between the individual and everyday reality. This relationship tends to favour interaction with objects, even if they are mass-produced and ubiquitous, even if they are produced by our industrial civilization and generally subjected to a frenetic whirlwind of consumerism. The quantification of commodities and products in the modern age becomes an element of distinction, and the very identity of the object: both in its positive sense – that of accumulation – and in the negative, which is that of destruction.

This means that in accumulation, but also in destruction and reconstruction of the object, this becomes a point of encounter that confirms the relationship between man – and the artist in particular – and reality. It is his distinguishing sign, and the certification and celebration of his ability to enter the world of reality actively and powerfully, contextualizing it in his own way, changing or complying with the rules of the game and the ultimate destination of all things. Arman takes over the object, establishing his mastery of everyday things, not in an intimist and elitist manner but rather through a quantitative appropriation, through accumulation and destruction of the entire existential process, and of all the globality and physicality of the object itself. If the world is consumption, the artist declares himself to be the most powerful and resistant of all.

Arman’s artistic bulimia, his extraordinary activism, and his inability to allow himself a pause in his work has raised the doubt that he too had been swallowed up and subjected to the relentless onslaught of consumerism and commodification, just as certain allusions to the formal beauty of the artefact might seem to have turned him towards a form of art that was also decorative. In actual fact, apart from some commercial concessions and digressions, the artist’s identity always enabled him to plunge into the vortex of the production and consumption of objects, continuing to dictate the rules and lead the way, giving him quantitative power over the object. As Pierre Restany had intuitively perceived, the style is that of Arman himself. Indeed, through the signs of his relentless language, his work is subject neither to limits nor to constraints and it is identified with the artist himself, becoming the characteristic feature of his way of working and being.
Giovanni Granzotto, Arman, Christo, The Others: on the side of reality in “Nouveau Realisme”, p. 15