DIDIER MARCEL

Curator: Clément Minighetti

It’s a question of admitting that art is not life and that art is always a difference produced between a real thing and its translation.
Didier Marcel

A profound artistic curiosity for sculptural questions concerning shape, size, texture and presentation is combined in the work of Didier Marcel with the know-how of an artist capable of orchestrating craftsmen specialised in contemporary materials to conceive sophisticated results.

The often mundane motifs of the works of Didier Marcel draw from the lands of his immediate environment. The tree trunk moulds in polyester resin adopt the position of supporting columns whose fibrous surfaces perfectly reflect the ornamental character of the bark. The presentations in relief of ploughed pieces of earth, objects pulled out of their context through their artificial reproduction or through their presentation on strange devices lend his work an enigmatic distance which the miniature, dilapidated buildings, reduced to sculptures also give.
Extracts of imaginary landscapes or elements of images in space, his works represent the details of a reality whose alienation underlines how the ideas that one has about nature are a cultural production

Didier Marcel is as much interested in plays of scale as he is in the sophisticated framing of his works. The very particular plinth structures, or the production in a sales showroom style, underlines the artificial character of the situation. It is with a certain elegance that the artist refers to art history without, however, citing it too explicitly. Thus, the rangy trunks of Didier Marcel have something of the works of Giacometti, and in his installation, Sans titre (Champ de blé aux corbeaux) (2008), he combines
allusions to one of the last paintings of Van Gogh with a wink to Marcel Duchamp. Didier Marcel responds to the sometimes nostalgic tones of his works with an impeccable technical perfection and surprising coloured accents.