Stéphane Vigny
Prendre à Césarfrom November 27 to January 15 - 2011
printStéphane Vigny places us within a complex aesthetic, which takes its elements from the rural world, the suburbs, the 'view along the road', and innocently brings them towards a new identity as artpieces, which one couldn't seriously consider as a coincidence. For Mallarmé 'the world 's been made to become a beautiful novel', Stéphane Vigny does nothing but adapt and develop this hypothesis in his own field.
With maniac care, and results he himself paradoxically calls rustic, he assembles, reinvents, dissects and spreads the substance of the elements he withdrew from reality. The delicate look of his meaningfull constructions, as meticulous and impeccable they may appear, actually reaches the state of radical conceptual work.
Here for the first time, Stéphane Vigny shows many objects wholly fabricated, « homemade ». He usually 'misappropriates' existing objects which one can still identify; which are still there and recognizable. Now the distortion is more radical. One identifies shapes, but the scale, the raw material, the function are altered whith new excess. Is the object therefore magnified, even when it's become smaller? Anyway it goes through a transformation that gives it a new status. It becomes a new entity, maybe even gifted with bare beauty.
Here and there one can see kinships with abstraction, or surpising fade-in of an incongruous emotional content in a 'product' that resembles (un)utilitary design, and goes beyond the joke towards a leap into semantics. Stéphane Vigny's work can indeed make one smile or laugh when one sees the artistic reference in it, or the historical, sociological hint, but, as all so-called funny things, it's everything but absent-minded. The title Take from Caesar confesses the nerve it takes to steal so much and give back more.
With maniac care, and results he himself paradoxically calls rustic, he assembles, reinvents, dissects and spreads the substance of the elements he withdrew from reality. The delicate look of his meaningfull constructions, as meticulous and impeccable they may appear, actually reaches the state of radical conceptual work.
Here for the first time, Stéphane Vigny shows many objects wholly fabricated, « homemade ». He usually 'misappropriates' existing objects which one can still identify; which are still there and recognizable. Now the distortion is more radical. One identifies shapes, but the scale, the raw material, the function are altered whith new excess. Is the object therefore magnified, even when it's become smaller? Anyway it goes through a transformation that gives it a new status. It becomes a new entity, maybe even gifted with bare beauty.
Here and there one can see kinships with abstraction, or surpising fade-in of an incongruous emotional content in a 'product' that resembles (un)utilitary design, and goes beyond the joke towards a leap into semantics. Stéphane Vigny's work can indeed make one smile or laugh when one sees the artistic reference in it, or the historical, sociological hint, but, as all so-called funny things, it's everything but absent-minded. The title Take from Caesar confesses the nerve it takes to steal so much and give back more.