Sébastien Rémy: les cellules blanches, nues et le sommeil électrique

Sébastien Rémy, with Raphaël Brunel, Alexis Guillier, Maud Jacquin, Luc Kheradmand, Émile Ouroumov, Elsa Polverel and Anne-Lou Vicente

Curator: Céline Poulin, assisted by Camille Martin

Last week I went to visit Sébastien Rémy at the psychiatric hospital in Etampes. Véronique Bathily had opened the institution to him for an artist’s residency and notably his project les cellules blanches, nues et le sommeil électrique (the naked white cells and electric sleep). I remember our first visit to the institution. Emilie[1], for instance, was clearly happy to see Sébastien again, whom she was in fact meeting for the first time. It’s something in his personality that she must have perceived intuitively, that empathy for places that gives you the impression he has always known them. And it’s true, moreover, that he takes special interest in ghosts.

When I arrived, he was in a discussion with someone, maybe one of the electricians working on the building. The wing is being restored and you have to take several corridors that open on empty rooms before you get to Rémy’s work space. There a standard room has been recreated, the only occupied room in the deserted place; the artist has been digitizing its elements. We thought it was important to base ourselves on the existing furniture to get beyond the iconic depictions of therapeutic spaces that fiction has conveyed. The bed and wardrobe look like those found in boarding schools. Here, as elsewhere, it is all about living someplace simultaneously with and without others. The communication complex with Otherness has profoundly influenced several of the artist’s pieces, like Tant que je vous parle ce n’est pas une frontière (It is no demarcation line as long as I am speaking to you). From Lee Lozano, one of the first artists to create “conversation pieces” and yet known to have stopped talking to women, to those characters in Wim Wenders’ films who are unable to simply talk with others, Tant que je vous parle ce n’est pas une frontière creates a Russian doll effect by using stories printed out on Plexiglas [...].

But it didn’t all begin there. I first met Sébastien Rémy in 2010 at a show in Bourges. Fresh from the fine arts school, he was showing several projects, including Diogène le chien : correspondances 2000-2009 (Diogenes Doglike: Correspondences 2000-2009), a piece that makes the dead thinker’s words concrete. We started a conversation that hasn’t stopped since. Our way of working and our obsessions are alike, notably our interests with the construction of polyphonic narratives and narrative modulation through the arrangement of images. I was already fascinated by the question of the lyrical assembler[2], and Rémy was to become a central figure in that theme [...].

Smooth talker, mediator, speaker, medium... whether he embodies these forms of orality, has others play these roles, or an installation of some kind deals with them, utterance is inevitably an essential part of each of the artist’s works. The piece called les cellules blanches, nues et le sommeil électrique will certainly be filled with his voice and the words of all the other authors who, along with him, bring a space to life. The show, I realize now, arranges recent appearances of projects that have punctuated my work with Rémy for nearly ten years at this point. He has brought many others into that conversation [...]. The voice of the building itself seems to materialize in the exhibition. Endlessly modified, transformed, and inhabited by multiple individuals, the architecture of CAC Brétigny speaks here in each of the artist’s works, represented in its daily use, collapsing into its resemblance with other empty white spaces, revealing glimpses of its impermanence and perhaps the fears springing from that.

Céline Poulin

[1] The names of patients have been changed.
[2] Céline Poulin, “Petra Genetrix and the Figure of the Lyrical Assembler,” in Porosity Valley, Portable Holes, Ayoung Kim, Ed. Ilmin Museum of Art, 2019.

Press file available here

Sébastien Rémy has recently shown his work at La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec (2016-2017), La Tabacalera, Madrid (2017), Ygrec (2017, 2014), Le Parc Saint Léger (2016, 2014), Le Pavillon Vendôme (2016), La Comédie, Caen (2016), La Maison des Arts, Malakoff (2015), Le Théâtre de l’Usine (2015), the Centre Pompidou (2014), La Villa Arson (2014), La Halle des bouchers (2014), La Fondation d’entreprise Ricard (2013), La Villa du Parc (2013), La Maison Populaire (2013), and La Tôlerie (2013). This is Sébastien Rémy’s first solo exhibition in an art institution.

CAC Brétigny is a facility of Cœur d’Essonne Agglomération and enjoys the support of the Ministry of Culture—Drac Île-de-France, the Île-de-France Region, and the Departmental Council of the Essonne, with additional support by the Ville de Brétigny-sur-Orge. It is a member of the TRAM and d.c.a networks.

This exhibition is a joint undertaking with the Établissement Public de Santé Barthélémy Durand site d’Étampes, the public preparatory class in Visual Arts of Grand Paris Sud and Drac Île-de-France (co-producers of sans titres (loss), 2018), and together with La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec. Tant que je vous parle ce n’est pas une frontière enjoys the generous support of Fondation des Artistes.