Stone, Art, Machines: Nicolas Bertoux & Cms

Feb 25, 2020

DIAPASON is the name of the work conceived by artist Nicolas Bertoux and performed by CMS using a Brembana Idroline S waterjet machine. Thanks to the invaluable assistance of its customer World Granite in the preparation and assembly stages, this work of art represents the rebirth of the stone that, once extracted from the quarry, returns reassembled as a mountain.

The Italian Stone Theatre is the Marmomac pavilion dedicated to Italian stone excellence, where the theme of the 2019 edition was "Naturality", that is, the naturalness of stone in its purest aspect. Man and technology deal with stone and nature, in a relationship of extreme relevance.

The exhibition Percorsi d'Arte, curated by Raffaello Galiotto and now in its second edition, looked into the topic, use of machines in the artistic working of stone. In recent years, with the spread of numerical technologies, both industry and artisans in the stone sector have supplied themselves with equipment increasingly high in performance. Five international artists who have been experimenting with numerical technologies in the stone working field for a long time have now created five works of art on the theme of Naturality, in collaboration with leading Italian manufacturers of machinery, software, and tools.

 

NICOLAS BERTOUX ON WATERJET TECHNOLOGY

Nicolas Bertoux was born in France and began his career as an interior designer in Paris before devoting himself entirely to sculpting. His main goal is to integrate his works into the environment, drawing inspiration from space, culture, history, and the nature of places. His monumental sculptures can be found in France at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, or, in the center of the city of Ronchamp. Other public art projects are exhibited in Taiwan at the Taipei Transport Institute, in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, in China at the Hsin Chu Cultural Center, the Shanghai Corporate Avenue, and the Beijing Olympic Park.

The artist himself explained how the collaboration with CMS brought about excellent results, unimaginable without the aid of a technologically advanced machine like the Brembana Idroline S. "Thanks to waterjet technology we are now capable of carrying out engraving in a marble block, as this technology enables separating the elements while almost touching them. Obviously this is something absolutely impossible to obtain with traditional technologies: i.e. cutting by hand with a chisel, a diamond disk, or a pneumatic hammer... This new technology allows us to achieve something that would never have been possible without the current waterjet technologies. More so, this waterjet machine is provided with 5 axes of inclination, allowing cuts that are perfectly suited for the project.

 

CMS STONE TECHNOLOGY

Roberto Mingardi, CMS Product Manager for the Stone Technology Department, analyses the implications from constantly pushing beyond the previous technological constraints. "The stimuli induced by the world of design and creativity represent for CMS new challenges to be taken up. All the curved lines drawn by the artist have been transformed into three-dimensional surfaces inclined in space. The real challenge was to insert these surfaces into a 12.5 cm thick block of marble. Technology has the task of meeting the needs of the market by transforming them into new products with new processes but, more than ever, it has the obligation to make these processes available to everyone, from a large factory to the small workshop.