Artists in residence

Frédéric Malette is a French artist who uses figures from our contemporary or past cultural history that he confronts with a geographical or social context in his works. In order to shed light on the questionable aspects of our common history, he draws raw feelings. In dialogues between graphite, colour, erasure and tearing, a form of uncompromising empathy for the beauty of our world, but also for its perversion, is apparent.

Charlie Malgat’s artistic practice has been developing for several years around a real obsession for the living for the living: “what moves, dances, convulses, changes and then mutates to stay alive”. The body (human/non-human) is her field of experimentation: she studies it, examines it, dissects it then reanimates it – putting in scene organs and pieces of flesh choreographed, transcended in a fictional immersive universe of humor and poetry, both sensual and trivial.

Using in turn video, sculpture, sound or drawing, each medium nourishes and completes the various facets of a virtual world where facets of a virtual world where an anthropomorphic donut (Agony, 2020), a pair of sound buttocks (Les fesses qui chantent, 2019), a mouth gaping to the uvula (Out, 2018), organs in a last

a last shiver of life (Extracting Organs, 2018) or a synthetic steak, cultivated in laboratory, delivering its states of mind (HD STEAK, Monocellular Spleen, 2016). Each work metonymically deploys a part of a body in an autonomous

of a body in an autonomous system, animated by a vital force which palpitates and which rumbles making emerge original feelings. The emancipation of these ‘sensitive objects’ is constituted in a game of back and forth between interiority and exteriority, certain objects being literally “stuffed sculptures” (term employed by the artist) of a matter ready to spout out.

The sculptures of Charlie Malgat, as the whole of its work, question our report with art and its objects that we consume. The desire to breathe life, to create a living sculpture, endowed with its own intentions and thus of a setting action, places the artist in a genealogy which worked the body and the object like equal autonomous systems: the body becoming object and the object becoming human. We leave the framework of an of the mimesis or the representation, to enter in a liberating art that taking the body as object freed from all its natural functions can leave the place to the undetermined, the undisciplined and the involuntary.

It is thus in a not subjective otherness, towards an emancipated other, that takes shape the art of Charlie Malgat, which by the tribulation of its living objects brings us to look at the interior of the systems which surround us, often intoxicated, which fail and regenerate infinitely.

-Sophie Delhasse