Jean Denant

Jean Denant - Vestiges

Technique: Fragments of Etruscan amphorae

Artist Biography: Jean Denant (Sète, France 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work, which moves between painting, architecture, design and sculpture, explores new fields through a plural practice that in turn inquires into the nature of materials, gestures and identity, and always reflects on the concept of reconstruction.Graduated in Applied Arts, he also studied Fine Arts in Toulouse and Krakow. He is represented in France by the Anne de Villepoix gallery (Paris) and in Spain by the RocioSantaCruz gallery (Barcelona).As Solenne Bertrand explains, Jean Denant's work questions the human through architecture. Considering that architecture redefines the world in which human beings evolve, the artist questions human nature through the creative gesture. In Jean Denant's work, architecture functions as a poetic and philosophical metaphor to take the pulse of the world. Whether it is a building or a human story, everything can be reduced to the concept of construction. Therefore, the artist invites us to enter into a continuous attempt of construction-deconstruction in order to generate new optics, to open cracks in the foundations of the hegemonic discourse. In his works, Denant plays with architecture by using simple and typical construction materials: by giving them an artistic purpose he provokes a voluntary discrepancy between the nobility of the gesture and the precariousness of the materials. His work defies definitions and abolishes the boundaries between art and reality, thus connecting with the proposals of post-structuralist philosophy.His work is present in several public and private collections, including the Fundació Vila Casas, the Fondation Carmignac (Paris and Ile de Porquerolles, France), the Fondation Villa Datris (Paris), the Kingdom of Belgium, the IKONE collection in Geneva, the FRAC LR (Montpellier) and the Musée Paul Valéry (Sète, France).His work has been part of important solo and group exhibitions and projects in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Barcelona, Geneva, Russia, China, Venezuela, United Arab Emirates and Seoul.

 

 

In 'Vestiges' Denant returns to architecture and its materials (cement, brick, stone) to bring us closer to these enclaves, in which exchanges function as a metaphor for the poetics that emerge from the concrete and move towards the symbolic, navigating between subjectivity and that which is common to us. The presence of the different cultures that characterize the Mediterranean region is represented as a true "multiverse of civilizations". And from the exchange of their symbolic universes we can recover commercial allegories such as those captured in this piece to unearth common vestiges, both mythological and contemporary.