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03/10/2009: "Vincent Testard, visual and plastic artist"
Vincent Testard, a 24 year-old visual artist, lives and works in Bordeaux. His research is centred on the different representations of the individual and their link to society. His work uses drawings, paintings, installations and video.
This interview is an opportunity to get some information on his exhibition planned at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, in June 2009.
Hi Vincent. Thanks for the interview. Can you introduce yourself a little bit?
Vincent Testard, visual and plastic artist, Bordeaux. I’m 24 years old, born in 1984. I spent two years at the Fine Arts School in Lyon before moving to Bordeaux five years ago.
Tell me a little bit about your next exhibition…
It’s an exhibition at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, in June. It’s in two stages, first of all Vital Architecture and secondly Proxemic System. They are two conceptually close ideas, but they will be presented differently.
The base of this work is the sociological notion called Proxemics, defined in 1969 by the American sociologist Edward Hall. Proxemics is the study of distances that people put between themselves in a given space, and in a given culture. For example, in a North-American culture, a European culture or an Asian culture, the distances that come between people are not the same. Edward Hall worked on this theory, putting it into diagrams and schematics.
Based on this theory, I am working on the notion of the first sphere of intimacy, the one that protects the individual. This is the sphere that we often sense in a crowded subway, when we feel uncomfortable. These invisible spheres bang into one another and create a loss of intimacy.
Explain Vital Architecture to me…
Vital Architecture is the translation of these spheres in an architectural manner. All the geometrical spaces that you can see on the canvas are individuals. I recreate fictional architecture through these images.
I always work on sequences of 24 photographic exposures that enable me to show the movement of individuals linked to a space and to other people. There is a triangular effect between architecture, the individual (Me) and the Others (the world). But I am also part of the Others, so these three ideas are to be understood together.
As a plastic artist, I adapt this concept to different mediums.
How is it going to be presented at the Galerie Tinbox?
For Vital Architecture, there is going to be a series of 24 drawings, that will each measure 24 x 36 cms, that is the homothety (the exact ratio) of the photographic negative, then treated with a video base. There will also be a big canvas and a video. The video will be in the Tinbox, as the concept of the Tinbox is an exhibition space and a closed and reduced box-space. There will also be a wall painting that will show 8 proxemic spheres.
The first exhibition, Vital Architecture, will last two and a half weeks (from the 28th of May to the 13th of June 2009). The second exhibition, Proxemic System, will be shown for three weeks (from the 18th of June to the 4th of July 2009).
Can you explain the idea of Proxemic System to me?
It’s the same topic but instead of working on architecture I am working on views from above, adapting them to spheres. The individual is completely absent and simplified.
There will be drawings and video, but also an installation of small cement pixels, that will represent in full-scale the first two proxemic spheres.
How did you get to this idea on Proxemics?
In high school I worked on portraits then, in Fine Arts School, I started doing group images that gradually became crowds. Then I started to study our individual identity in an urban space. Little by little, I rethought my technique, my stroke, my concepts.
When I got to the idea of crowds, I started to simplify my images, taking away all the architecture and working only on the individual.
After that, I worked on greyness and lines. This idea came from a work I did in Fine Arts School, where I photographed the television, and through the process of the interval between the number of images shown per second, I got an image with a huge amount of lines that appeared, almost blurred.
Little by little the individuals lost all identity, and only their silhouettes remained.
Now I feel quite comfortable with the Vital Architecture concept but I am still not able to define it completely, to see its limits. All this comes to me plastically, as I am a visual artist, I am here to produce images, I don’t always want to know what I am doing and control it. It’s then up to each and everyone to interpret the artwork and the concepts according to his/her own perception.
Thank you Vincent.
You can discover Vincent Testard’s work at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, from the 28th of May to the 4th of July, or on his website www.testardvincent.com
http://www.galerie-tinbox.com/
Vital Architecture opens on the 28th of May at 7p.m.
Proxemic System opens on the 18th of June at 7 p.m.
