the essential
Carlos Tormo is a handyman. Retired from the technical services of the town hall, he is passionate about creating models and metal sculptures. After creating a 7 meter high Eiffel Tower, visible from the Cruscades road, he reproduced the Saint-Félix church which he installed in his garden.
The Saint-Félix church remains, for the Lézignan residents, a landmark, even a symbol of attachment for those who had to move away from it one day. For Carlos Tormo, it is just as important: it is there that he got married, there that his children were baptized… So, one day, he decided to pay homage to it while indulging in his passion of fine DIY: metal sculpture. “I had wanted to reproduce it in a model for a while: at the beginning, I wanted to make it in stones, but it was complicated, I had to saw the stones with a grinder… As I had some sheets left, I decided to use it”confides the retiree from the town hall’s technical services. It must be said that the idea had been running through his head for a while: since 2010, precisely, when he copied the plans carefully kept in the town hall. In total, some 130 hours of work were necessary for this self-taught man who learned on the job to erect the monument – the only one classified in Lézignan – on a scale of 1/30: “No, I didn't have any training as a welder or anythinghe blurted. I learned everything on my own: when doing work in my house for example. Professionally, I spent my entire career at the town hall: I was a garbage collector, a mason, an electrician, and I ended up as a technical services storekeeper..
And it was precisely within the municipal workshops that his hobby was born. It was the day one of his colleagues retired: “He was a sweeper, so I reproduced his work tool, a small cart that could carry two bags. I liked it, so I continued”.
170 hours of work for the Eiffel Tower
This is also how he decided to reproduce the famous work of Gustave Eiffel: the eponymous tower on a 1/40th scale. There too, Carlos Tormo obtained the original plans to make, after 170 hours of work, a sculpture that can be admired from the Cruscades road. A 7 meter high model, all the same, which had to be transported from the back of his house to the entrance, with a lot of muscular arms. Since his retirement, every morning, the former municipal agent spends them in his workshop for two or three hours a day. The opportunity to please his grandson, for whom he made a sublime metal tanker truck! Or to imagine diverse and varied animals assembled according to the salvaged elements that he can unearth : “Of course, it takes me time, he confides. But I don't fish, I don't hunt. It's my passion. I did 22. I would like to get to around thirty… To exhibit them one day? Who knows? The idea is gaining ground… But humility very quickly returns to his words: “I consider myself a tinkerer, not an artist”.
However, the alliance between imagination and know-how suggests the opposite…
