Olivier de Sagazan, a multidisciplinary artist known for his hybrid and visceral performances, has spent decades exploring the themes of transformation, otherness and the enigma of existence. His approach questions the relationship between being and its fleshly envelope, between the inert and the organic, between man and the earth that gave rise to him.

A biologist by training, he attacks his sculptures with the obsession of bringing them to life, of turning them into active fetishes. In 1998, after days of work with no result, an intuition drove him to plunge his body into clay. This gesture marked a turning point, a kind of initiatory rite that led him from painting to performance, and then to dance.

This exhibition focuses on the artist's most recent works, halfway between painting, sculpture and puppetry. A body of large-format pieces that extends his performative research into the realm of frozen matter, to which the artist strives to give the appearance of bodies that life has just left.

To do this, he creates mannequins that he assembles in his workspace, hollowing out certain parts so they merge into the two-dimensional space of the canvas, keeping others in three dimensions, and painting the whole to create unity. The bodies are cut, reduced or duplicated, in order to produce effects of perspective, a sensation of movement and the ever-present unease between the internal perception of bodies and their external appearance.

By blending chaos and gestation through a demiurgic act, the artist evokes a rebirth, a return to the mother-earth and to creative energy. This proposal thus highlights his sculptural work: the questioning of the body as a battleground for struggle, mutation and transcendence. The works on display reflect contemporary concerns about our relationship to the living, to the inert matter that gave rise to it, and to metamorphosis.

A powerful face-to-face encounter with humanity at its most vulnerable and most fundamental.

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