EXPOSITION 'ESPACES ACTIVES', 2024
Les œuvres de Marc-Antoine Decavèle se forment dans la continuité de ses réflexions et de ses pensées issues de l’histoire de l’art, de la littérature, ou de la philosophie. Sa pratique de la peinture entretient un rapport subtil entre le visible et l’invisible, et ses œuvres rendent possible ce point de rencontre entre les deux. Ses travaux sont tactiles et exigent une appréciation du grain car l’intention de l’artiste est de nous faire ressentir l’image. Il tient dans le choix de ses outils et de son médium à garder une distance physique entre lui et l’image afin de “ne pas trop s’imprimer”. La réflexion autour de sa méthode et de son geste font toujours preuve d’une véritable précision entre l'épure et la divagation.
Dans la série “Vers la vision” présentée à cette exposition, Marc-Antoine Decavèle utilise différents pistolets qui viennent projeter la peinture. C’est à force de répétitions, sous les gestes de l’artiste que le visible affleure dans l’invisible et, la lumière dans l’obscurité. Et c’est ainsi que que l’image apparaît. A chaque passage invisible du geste, Marc-Antoine amène la lumière, il l’incorpore à l'obscurité présente, les deux se lient. Par la vibration qui se crée au contact de l’une dans l’autre, tout ce qui s’échappe devient dispersion et entre en résonance. C’est un nouvel espace qui se sculpte et qui vient en révéler ses vibrations, ses échos. L’image se rapproche alors de l’idée de lieu, et nous ouvre un champ vers la vision.
EXPOSITION 'FEU', 2023
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.