Nicolas Deshayes: Chambre froide (Cold store) / Stéphane Thidet: Bruit rose (Pink Noise)

This summer, Le Grand Café—Contemporary Art Centre offers two exhibitions, within the art centre and off-site at LiFE, submarine base.

At Le Grand Café—Contemporary Art Centre, June 4–September 11, 2022

Nicolas Deshayes: Chambre froide [Cold Store]
Sculptor Nicolas Deshayes works with industrial processes which he goes on to contradict through organic gestures. His sometimes-phantasmagorical or baroque formal universe is open to multiple readings, from the mechanisms of domestic objects to mutant bodies. Despite the hardness of his preferred materials—bronze, cast aluminium or ceramic—Nicolas Deshayes produces sculptures in which the sensation of malleability prevails. The body is omnipresent but only in fragments, and we perceive mysterious organic forms, stripped flesh, membranes that suggest skin – the organ of surface and exchange between interior and exterior.

Is it a question of humans, of animals or of hybrid beings in full chrysalis-like metamorphosis? The different scales of his works muddy the waters. Some of them reproduce circulatory systems that can transport water or heat in the image of bodily fluids, while others display the actual porosity of bodies, materials and objects. His equivocal sculpture with multiple sources provokes ambiguous feelings that go from the trivial to the fantastical.

Biography
Born in France in 1983, Nicolas Deshayes lives and works in Dover, Kent (Great Britain).

He graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2005 and the Royal College of Art in London (GB) in 2009.

Recently, Nicolas Deshayes had solo shows at Modern Art, London (ongoing); Le Creux de l'Enfer art centre in Thiers and at the Frac Grand Large in Dunkirk (France, 2021); E-werk, Luckenwalde (Germany, 2019); Basement Roma, Roma (Italy, 2018); Tate St Ives, Cornwall (GB, 2015); Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow (GB, 2015) and S1 Artspace, Sheffield (Sheffield, 2013).

Nicolas Deshayes is represented by Modern Art (London).

At LiFE—submarine base, July 8–October 2, 2022

Stéphane Thidet: Bruit rose [Pink Noise]

The artist Stéphane Thidet is drawn to flows and to overflows. He has a preference for sculpting living and natural elements, yet there is nothing naturalistic about his approach. The work is made up of processes of displacement: the artist creates very few new forms, choosing instead to imagine and create situations based on taking known objects and thinking about their potential for something new. His method could be modestly summed up as the act of using things in another way, and when he sculpts with water or sand it is as much about experiencing the power of the elements as exploring the human psyche.

In 2020 he unveiled his spectacular Voyage à Nantes commission Rideau [Curtain], a thunderous waterfall gushing from the façade of the Opéra Graslin. As an echo to it, he imagined filling the LiFE with an entirely new installation that matched the scale of the submarine base’s monumental architecture. This proposition was postponed by the pandemic until summer 2022. Entitled Bruit rose [Pink Noise], the work revisits the motif of the waterfall and takes it in a geological direction: its hypnotic sonic landscape calls up paradoxical images, from respiration to collapse, savage force to fragility.

Biography
Born in 1974, Stéphane Thidet lives and works in Paris, France.
He graduated from the École supérieure d'art et de design Le Havre—Rouen and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts Paris.

Ongoing collective shows: Utopia, Lille3000, France; Guizhou Provincial Museum, Guiyang, China; Maat, Lisbon, Portugal

Recent solo shows (selection): Laurence Bernard Gallery, Genève (Switzerland, 2020); Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (France, 2019); La Conciergerie, Paris (2018);Chiesa di Santa Monica, Florence (Italy, 2018); La Maréchalerie, Versailles (France, 2018)

Stéphane Thidet is represented by Aline Vidal (Paris).
 

Curator: Sophie Legrandjacques, director of Le Grand Café—Contemporary Art Centre

Press contact: anne samson communication / Federica Forte, federica@annesamson.com