epoxy, table desk, 85 x 140 x 15 cm Jean

Jean-Charles de Quillacq
The diving mask Selected works
2009 — 2012
2012 — epoxy, table desk, 85 x 140 x 15 cm
Bread and cigarettes
2012 — blue ball-pen ink blown on epoxy (437 pens), 153 x 55 x 14 cm
Feet first, exhibition view Four works in a rectangle, Rote Fabrik, Zürich
2012 — trestles, lacquer, 310 x 75 x 75 cm
Untitled (no devil beneath the sea) 2011 — epoxy, metal, broom, 153 x 55 x 10 cm
Open studio, exhibition views
2011 — Project space south, Amsterdam
Not the reproduction of something i experienced myself
2011 — metal tube, pvc tube, epoxy, lacquer, styrofoam, 100 x 220 x 160 cm
Not the reproduction of something i experienced myself
2011 — metal tube, pvc tube, epoxy, lacquer, styrofoam, 100 x 220 x 160 cm
In search of a good stimulant
2011 — c-print, 6 buckets of epoxy, acrylic paint, styrofoam, 100 X 70 x 167 cm
My complice i
2011 — c-print, epoxy, 44,5 x 44,5 cm
Self-oral-portrait
November 26 2011 — intervention with shirt
during the opening night, Open studio, Project space south, Amsterdam
Her as me
2011 — framed inkjet print on baryta paper, 204 x 154 cm
pages 96 & 97 from : Hein Gericke Katalog 1987 / 3
2011 — taped laser prints, 290 x 193 cm
Foto Feet Father Floor
2011 — trestle, c-print, magnets, 52 x 73 x 118 cm
Sister circle foot with radiator
2011 — painted epoxy, metal, paper towels, radiator, 46 X 33 x 246 cm
Sister circle foot
2011 — painted epoxy, metal, 123 x 28 x 28 cm
Challenge Nathalie
2010 — photographs transferred on t-shirt, painted steel structure, 196 x 77 x 41 cm
The imitation 2011 — trestles, tape, styrofoam, 365 x 100 x 100 cm
Je me reproduis pas je me copie 2011 — metal, cork, 196 x 77 x 67 cm
Quillacq ouverte
2010 — spray paint and silk-screen on vintage movie poster, 160 x 120 cm
Perfect mask (I, II, III)
2010 — interventions on
inkjet prints with tape, serie of six, 90 x 60 cm each
Perfect mask (IV, V, VI)
2010 — interventions on
inkjet prints with tape, serie of six, 90 x 60 cm each
Foto & fimo, exhibition views La moitié des choses, Bétonsalon, Paris
2010 — photographs, mixed media, serie of 4,60 x 65 x 96 cm each
Under my skin
2010 — inkjet print glued on the wall, framed c-print, 63 x 96 cm
My hands in your converse, exhibition views My hands in your sneakers, Galerie Juliètte Jongma,
Amsterdam
2010 — cork, oil on wood, tape (copy of a painting by Michiel Ceulers) 46 x 46 x 49 cm
Spectre citron
September 26 2009 — c-prints, two hours
performance during the exhibition Playtime, Bétonsalon, Paris
Work description
Introduction
My ideas are extremely plastic realities that I only formulate as I give them shape. I rely on the unconscious
and the montage effects it produces in time. Somewhat like an incubation period the unconscious provides
me with inspiration for shapes that then undergo a process of digestion before it becomes a fully formed
entity. In my work I strive to convey this mobility of things. The openings or drainage tubes that are recurrent
in my shapes suggest outflows and fluidity. Their form allows my eye to move through them : feeling the
thickness or depth of a body, just like traversing space, I can afford impressions that to me seem to illustrate
the unconscious flow of my thoughts and their transformations.
The idea of surface and what it necessarily hides is also crucial to my work. By working on my photos in pen,
for example, I overlap painted surfaces with repetitive scribbling exposing the surface of my images in a very
physical manner. This repetitive movement between the surface and what lies behind reproduces a swinging
motion between conscious and unconscious. Also, the studious and tactile nature of working this way makes
me stay with my work for a long time creating intimacy.
Permutating The diving mask ; Challenge Nathalie ; The imitation ; Under my skin
I take photos of my pre-existing photos or even of my sculptures (Under My Skin, Challenge Nathalie). By
working into many pictures of the same image my shapes fluctuate throughout the successive versions I give
them. This process exposes the reversal of an idea - from its first realization to its evolution in time. It does
not define its content permanently but reveals it in an ambivalent, repetitive and fragmentary manner.
The Imitation comes from a similar idea. Here my aim was to try to reproduce the outline and gradation of
colours of Challenge Nathalie despite using other materials that are much more elementary. Elsewhere, The
Diving Mask repeats the mask from a pre-existing photographic portrait.
In this way, I repeat my shapes, which evolve with each of their materializations. I avoid developing any
hierarchy between them or strive for a logic to point at their improvement. These different versions mutually
coexist and do not invalidate each other. Each one exists as alternative ways of being. They are in opposition
to a world I find based on hierarchical order and in which the identities of people have been defined. Through
repetition and self-imitation I can also resist the passing of time and contradict the idea of evolution. I
renounce the progressiveness of time that carries me to adulthood and places me in the society with an
almost finalized role. I think a primitive and immature state of mind is able to welcome alternative imaginations
of subjectivity in life.
My sculpting work also frequently involves the assembling of several materials, without it ever seeming
definitive. If the various elements composing my sculptures are not simply laid one over the other I always
favour a very low-fi system to fasten them together. Magnets, elastics or scotch tape are as easy to use as
they are to undo. Above all they ensure the integrity of each part that they link together. Nothing is ever
merged in my work, every component always remains distinct from the other and can be undone and redone
very simply. Thus, my work can continue its permutating nature. This is also why I’m especially careful as
to the weight of my sculptures. The Styrofoam, cork, paper, epoxy and polymeric resins that I use are very
lightweight materials. I need to be able to move and rearrange my work, even the way I install it in exhibition
spaces is open for manipulation and potential speculation.
Transvestism My Complice I ; Self-oral-portrait ; Her as me ; Foto feet father floor ; Sister circle
foot with radiator ; Quillacq ouverte ; Foto & fimo
I also make use of my body as I do of other materials to express the idea of mobility. Following Marcel
Duchamp who forged himself a feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, whom he described as «a little game
between I and me», I try to make my sexual identity waver. For example by blurring genders in Quillacq
Ouverte I feminize my own name. This piece of work consists of a poster for a Maurice Pialat movie, La
Gueule Ouverte [The Mouth Agape], which I’ve painted over in white except for the word «ouverte» which is
the feminine inflection of the word «open» in French. I then silk-screened my family name onto the poster.
Developing this gender ambiguity further I portray a young woman as another me in Her as Me. In the photo
my sister shows her birthday cake to the camera, paralleling how I show my work to the public. I already
photographed her in a swimming pool (My Complice I) and afterwards I photographed myself imitating her
and sporting a wig.
Along these same lines, in the performance Self-Oral-Portrait, I hold up a shirt in front of myself with my mouth.
The shirt acts as a double, doubling my own body. I consider the shirt as being halfway between myself and
another person.
I am also especially interested in Duchamp and his erotic «environment» as in Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The
Illuminating Gas. Here two tiny holes in the solid wood door reveal the painting of a naked woman’s body, her
legs splayed apart. The inclination to look through the holes of Duchamp’s piece relate to the desire to look
through the tubular shapes in my own sculptures.
My work is sensual not just due to the materials I use and its images, but also through the many contacts I
establish between the various elements I assemble. I do not think of my work as finished products but rather
as pieces producing connections which necessarily involves creating relationships between things. These
links are sometimes so big, so intimate, that I perform them at the expense of the work’s visibility with various
components hiding each other. I work into my objects a kind of visual shortfall, an emptiness which I do not
perceive as an absence or a short coming. For instance in Foto & Fimo, the lack of visibility in my images
allows them to be the receiver of my fancies. My desires are fickle, but often what I seem to have totally lost
sight of is what in the end comes back to me most forcefully.
Backward Movements
Untitled (no devil beneath the sea) ; Self-oral-portrait ; Her as me ;
pages 96 & 97 from : Hein Gericke Katalog 1987 / 3
My way of working is based on self-imitation and mimitism. I create « families » of objects that become even
more elementary and self-referential. I also frequently incorporate in my work familiar objects. Family photos,
a broom or a radiator can sketch out a domestic space. The tables I reproduce (Foto & Fimo) call to mind the
meeting place for the family. The family organization can be run by filial relationships assigning each of its
members a precise identity in its community. I try to pervert this organization with the increasingly primitive
reformulations of my sculptures. Instead of enriching each new generation, my work loses information and
becomes more oblique, reversing the structure of genealogy.
I relate this idea of backward movements to the very regressive situation I created in the performance
Self-Oral-Portrait. This performance took place in the opening night of one of my exhibitions. Instead of
playing the supposed role of an artist during this type of social occasion I was holding a shirt with my mouth
and hiding my face remaining inaccessible to the guests and unable to talk.
Simultaneously with this action I fuel my work with a certain nostalgia that constantly draws me back to the
1980s. I was born in 1979 and the family photos I use belong to that period. Just like the magazine pages
I reproduce in the pages 96 & 97 from : Hein Gericke Katalog 1987 / 3. More widely I believe my art practice
could be seen as reminiscent of the work processes of the generation of artists that appeared in the 1980s.
I feel close to Robert Gober’s everyday objects and of the metaphorical dimension of the deformations he
subjects them to, mirroring the fluctuations of his inner emotive life. I am also informed by erasure as a
production method that Christopher Wool resorts to, such as his downgraded pictorial elements, erasures,
thick layering of paint and lean texts, which I clearly echo in Quillacq Ouverte. I feel heavily influenced by this
generation who devised conceptual practices in which it was intensely engaged emotionally and I share with it
the heightened proximity it maintains with the objects it produces.
Jean-Charles de Quillacq, FR (1979, FR)
Nordstrasse 272
8037 Zürich - Switzerland
Education
2001-2003 MFA (Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique), with honours,
École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon, FR
1998-2001 BA (Diplôme National d’Art Plastique), École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon, FR
Residencies
2012 Duende Studios, Rotterdam, NL
2010-2011 Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, NL
2011 Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut, Rome, Rome, IT
2003-2004 Gaststudium directed by Karin Sander, Berlin-Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, DE
Fellowships/stipends
2011 G.E. Loudon Esq. and M. Loudon Esq., GB
2001 Institut Français, FR
2011 Van Bijleveltstichting, NL
2010 L’Institut Français des Pays-Bas, NL
2009 Adera (Aide au post-diplôme), FR
2007 Direction Régionale d’Art Contemporain du Limousin (Aide individuelle à la création), FR
Awards
2004 Hélène Linossier prize, awarded by the École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon, Lyon, FR
2002 Charles Dufraine prize, awarded by the École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon, Lyon, FR
Solo and two-person exhibitions
2012 Four Works in a Rectangle, Rote Fabrik, Zürich, CH (solo)
2011 Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Institut français des Pays-Bas, Amsterdam, NL (solo)
2011 My hands in your sneakers, Galerie Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam, NL (duo)
(Selected) group exhibitions
2013 Letters by the useless spectator, Hobusepea Gallerii, Tallinn, EE
2012 Reflections on form, Barbara Seiler Galerie, Zürich, CH
2012 Incubate, NS16, Tilburg, NL
2012 Le vicomte pourfendu, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris, FR
2012 Closed because of the goings-on, Galerie Dukan Hourdequin, Paris, FR
2012 Breach, Rod Barton Gallery, London, GB
2012 Tossing around with a chair in the corridor, Duende, Rotterdam, NL
2012 Rair #4, Boompjes 60-68, Rotterdam, NL
2011 RijksakademieOPEN, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, NL (cat)
2011 Le Bal des Débutantes, Gallery Klemm’s, Berlin, DE
2011 56° salon d’art contemporain de Montrouge, La Fabrique, Paris, FR (cat)
2010 Rowena Hughes, Eddie Peake, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Rod Barton Gallery, London, GB
2010 RijksakademieOPEN, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, NL (cat)
2010 La moitié des choses, Bétonsalon, Paris, FR (cat)
2010 Saint Christophe, performance in collaboration avec Maxime Thieffine, Bétonsalon, Paris, FR
2009 I am not a Fortune Teller / prototype, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, FR
2009 Playtime, Bétonsalon, Paris, FR
2009 Peer to Peer, Collection 05, Casino Luxembourg - Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg, LU
2008 Edition:exposition, Maison du Livre de l’Image et du Son, Villeurbanne, Lyon FR
2008 Ride a White Horse, Néon, Lyon, FR
2007 Collection 05, Musée du Temps, Besançon, FR
2007 Veuillez patienter, CCO, Villeurbanne, FR
2007 Les enfants du sabbat 5, Le creux de l’enfer, Centre d’art contemporain, Thiers, FR (cat)