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BIO
Born in 1971, I currently live in Boston MA (USA) and work everywhere else... including in my studio in Tarn et Garonne (southwest France).
Graduate architect (HochSchule für Architektur und Bauweisen, Weimar, Germany, and architecte DPLG - EAPLD - Nanterre, France), I practiced in Paris for ten years.
In 1999, I began designing and producing stage sets for the theater. Since 2002, I have focused entirely on live performance, as a set designer, author and musician (I have always been involved in musical projects alongside my work as an architect). These early experiences in the performing arts, a number of collaborations and my involvement at the very heart of projects alongside directors, prompted me to think more broadly about the links between dramaturgy and scenography.
In 2004, I created my own theater company, Le Bruit des Nuages, with which I bring to the stage visual dramaturgies of which I am the author, and which I wish to be resolutely rooted in a stage practice that is nonetheless hybrid, blending live performance and the visual arts.
The company functions as a laboratory that allows me to experiment with visual work outside the constraints of orders. It's also a creative and collaborative space that allows me to meet other artistic fields. As a result, our projects have been presented in theaters and contemporary art centers.
Since its creation, the company has received support from ADAMI, le Centre National du Théâtre (writing grant award), DMDTS - Ministère de la Culture (writing grant award), DRAC Provence-Alpe-Côte d'Azur, Région Provence-Alpe-Côte d'Azur, Conseil Général des Bouches-du-Rhône, Ville de Cannes and Ville de Marseille.
Over time (and although I remain attached to fiction), my work tends to make the performer disappear from the stage. Since 2016, through scenography of exhibitions, festive events or monumental installations that I create in situ, I've been making a gentle shift towards the visual arts, from the inside (black boxes) to the outside (the open air and nature).
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ARTISTIC APPROACH
The particularity of my artistic practice has a lot to do with my career path.
I always think of it as a kind of highway, with multiple entrances and exits, but a single direction that sometimes bends to reach new horizons. If I'm always in the vehicle moving forward (I prefer if it’s a bike), I'm not always the driver... And those who take me along know that they bring with them the whole of what I am as an artist, that is to say, my practice (entropic and exploded) and my obsessions (very easy to pin down, since they are recurrent by nature). In other words, part of the time, I'm an artist for others, and this greatly influences what I produce for myself. And vice versa.
After architecture, the ecosystem in which I evolved was live performance, for a long time. That's why almost all my work, even when it's purely visual, goes through a dramaturgical filter. It's a prerequisite. I need to tell myself a story, and tell it to others. Not that it gives meaning to the work, but that it generates it. That's also why, in all my collaborations on stage, I'm involved right from the start of the project. I'm involved in telling the story, not illustrating it after the fact.
I don't have a preferred "medium", and if I had to find one, I'd say that "space" is my working material. By "space" I mean the relationship that objects (and incidentally humans) have with each other, and the tensions and interactions that this relationship generates. As a result, my work is almost always about volume, without being defined as sculpture. They are spaces to be experienced, physically or mentally. My projects question "space", but also relationships of scale, from the macroscopic to the real, notably through the possibilities afforded by digital tools.
Symbolism plays an important role in my work, and is often a distorted representation of reality. I therefore create both autonomous micro-spaces and large-scale immersive spaces on a human scale, which borrow from reality, bear witness to it and use its codes, but are not necessarily its representation.
My conceptual universe lies at the crossroads of several long-standing themes: the inevitable disappearance of the human species, by whatever means, a strong attraction to spatial iconography, a taste for sci-fi (and in particular for "dystopian" literature and social anticipation), the creation of autonomous "cosmogonies"... all of which are probably just one theme... In a very global and probably a little ambitious way, I'm interested in the future of humanity. My stance is that of an observer, and I work with the offbeat, the incongruous, even the playful, to draw attention to a subject, a story.
My artistic approach is thus a thematic archipelago that takes shape in a multitude of ways, even including music and writing. From making huge, large-format female cosmonauts when I was just out of my teens (I've still got some left, if you'd like some in your garden.... ) to L'espace des jardiniers (a reflection on the future of agriculture), via Lunar Trash, an eco-lunar proposition on our relationship to virgin lands or the fragmentary description of a world on borrowed time in Rétrospective incomplète d'une disparition définitive, the object of my work is probably one and the same breath, which aims to poetize an elsewhere that some imagine will one day be humanity's lifeline, but which is in reality only a goal beyond our reach.
