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Artist born in 1976, lives and works in Paris. 

At the start of Cyprien Chabert's postulate, there is the materialization by the drawing of an architectural thought. In this quest for volume, the artist has a habit of investing urban spaces to deploy plant designs. Outgrowths hatch on its walls and beyond, felt gardens embrace the surfaces of its architecture. The collision between two distinct vocabularies, that of the manufactured and that of the living, questions the very notion of landscape.
It allows the emergence of various questions, such as the slippery balance between design, architecture and ornament.

Islands and Seas (2021), a series of cartographic sculptures showing the reliefs
of several utopian islands, pursues a reflection that the artist has been carrying out for ten years. Cyprien Chabert introduces the idea of a stone-landscape as an aesthetic object. The work represents architectural islands, reduced to their most rudimentary expressions, white and plaster reliefs with clean shapes. Placed on wooden trays, the islands recall
the shapes of suisekis, stones naturally polished by water, acclaimed in Japan for their expressive textures and the meditative virtues attributed to them. The distorted scales of Islands and Seas play on the confusion of perception. The work functions as a cartographic portrait of another world, a series of miniature archipelagos that we tread on with our giant steps.
It can be read like the illustration of a traveller's story, possibly that of Gulliver from the pen of Jonathan Swift or that of Axel Lidenbrock in a novel by Jules Vernes. Transplanted as heroes of the imaginary worlds of adventure novels, explorers of the coasts of a fictional flying island, here we are called to explore its phantasmagorical coasts; caught up in the curving landscape of its stony forests.

As an extension of Islands and Seas, his series of drawings represents both maps of distant islands, and variations of satellite maps crossed by a white spectrum, taking on the character of ghost islands. The works resemble encyclopaedic plates, borrowing a classical language from academic drawing. They are also close to engraving, the one found in old books or parchments. The works thus close this dialogue begun with the literary adventure, letting dawn a treasure island where the real mixes with the fantastic.

Å’UVRES
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