After the hunt: energetically wrought banisters, door handles and chandeliers are among the fixtures created by Saint Clair Cemin for the renovated Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris

The sculptures at Templon sat like neo-modernist baubles in a wide white space. The monumental bronze works recall octopus tentacles in particular: the best of these, Lila (dance), 2007, involves two interlocking creatures with three tentacles each. In a sense, they are not so different from the chandeliers in the Musee de la Chasse, though more massive and heavier. These are works you want to touch, but they also repel by their formal excess.

Of the stainless pieces, Mirror (Bianfu), 2007, is the largest, a freestanding, predominantly frontal structure, with odd symmetrical lobes resting on a pair of legs appended in back. Its abstract form evokes a pelvic close-up, but its frontality and its slightly impromptu support also suggest a decorative object of display, a large basket with a handle. The effect is rhetorical and a bit hollow. The more convincing steel pieces, based on geometric solids, are hunkered down, lying directly on the floor. Supercuia (2007) suggests an outcropping of multiple breasts around a central core. (In fact, the artist told me that the swollen forms depicted are based on the gourds used to drink mate.) In 2003 a colossal outdoor fiberglass version of Supercuia was exhibited in the Porto Alegre Biennial, in southern Brazil, and was then acquired by the city (the sculpture also exists in several colored fiberglass versions).

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The strangest of the steel pieces, Verbe Etre (2007), has ornamental joints, at once foliate and vaguely testicular. These connect the four flat surfaces of a pyramid. Nature and geometry are constantly morphing in Cemin's sculptural universe. The artist is a dreamer and an autodidact who quotes liberally, in conversation and in titling his work, from William Blake, Gaston Bachelard and Gregory Bateson. The surprise here was how well Cemin's oneiric streak integrates with the forms of Brazilian vernacular, high modernism and French decor.

The Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature reopened, after a three-year renovation, in January 2007. Cemin showed at Galerie Daniel Templon from Sept. 8 to Oct. 20, 2007. Richard Milazzo, Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta, was published by Brent Sikkema Editions in 2005. Cemin will show new work at Brent Sikkema in New York in May 2008.

Brooks Adams is a writer who lives in Paris.

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