My Collection - Cabinet d'Expertise Automates, Art Forain & Musique à Mécaniques

WARNING & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS to the READER

Training, ambition and job.

First, collecting is a perpetual search ...
Not necessarily to conduct a cultural research on a given theme, but rather to be in a state of alert, to hunt, to pass by long anxious expectations and, as for a rare game, to leave the pieces of lesser interest to leap on that worthy of emotion... Whatever the sacrifice is.

Collecting as a way of life?
No, just create privileged moments, create moments to escape from everyday life. First of all a collection resembles those that have gathered it; it is a totally subjective and biased vision of the subject which it claims to account for. Please forgive the shortcomings. If you are tempted to make a stretch of the road we have travelled, know that it has taken us hours, years of observation, listening, comparison, humility before refining our taste, forming our ear.

The visit of the Museums of the World is an indispensable formative element. Each instrument conveys in addition to emotional impact, its own cultural past; we had to get to know them to better appreciate them. This helped us to choose the pieces rigorously so that they bear witness at the same time:

the imaginative effervescence that characterizes artisans, engineers and creative artists
the simplicity and finesse of means used to access pleasure, games and the wonderful...
a very particular aesthetics and richness of sound documents we can encounter.

This is enough to outline the difficulty that governs the constitution but also the restoration of a collection. It is not enough to engrave the object. It is necessary that the instrument sings, that it finds its breath and its brilliance. Our restoration work requires a variety of qualities, reflection, patience and even perseverance, a taste for documentary research and so much care that a restoration takes place over an infinite amount of time.

The one of a musical piece of the importance of a carousel organ is planned over two years. Beyond the technical part, the most delicate questions arise on the aesthetic plane; we must know where to stop. Sometimes a refurbishment can destroy an object. It is not necessary that an automaton painted a hundred years ago be clean and... soulless. Knowing that this point of view is not unanimously shared, we must discern the outrage that must absolutely be repaired, from the crack not to touch under penalty of disfiguring the whole.

We look at our little world with indulgence because we thank them for still being with us.

Eve + Philippe Crasse

We especially thank the eye of Jean-Louis GARNELL, who so beautifully sublimated these objects of art... Most of these shots were gathered in a book published by the Regional Council of Midi-Pyrénées during the exhibition of the collection at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1987.