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| Grout/Mazéas |
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For L.F.D.A. 02.At the heart of the White Geology we discover a “decor” by Sylvain Grout and Yann Mazéas – a wooden construction, extremely simple and flimsy when seen from the outside, recreating a dwelling on two storeys. The battens and base supports are visible behind its walls, clearly indicating its artificiality, while inside, all of the furniture is real. As so often in Grout and Mazéas’s work, the apparently ordinary setting – seemingly straight out of a film set – has been the object of a carefully planned and executed, deliberately artistic process of destruction. During the installation of La Force de l’Art 02, Grout/Mazéas carefully sliced the structure into three with a chainsaw, includng the furniture. The central segment was then placed against a wall of the neighbouring exhibition space. This section was taken from the middle of the decor, leaving an opening that forms an empty passage through its middle, which visitors can follow. A viscous liquid (glucose syprup) flows down the walls and furniture of the two remaining sections, giving them a repulsive appearance and – above all – making them impossible to use, destroyed in their own, much slower way. Violently sectioned – as if Gordon Matta-Clark had fallen in with Texas Chainsaw’s Leatherface – and dripping like some form of fluid, organic matter, Grout/Mazéas’s new decor dramatises the inherent contradictions in the creative process, incorporating rupture and continuity, pre-planned gesture and accident. Grout/MazéasThe transcendent and astonishing decors by Sylvain Grout and Yann Mazéas call for the spectator's active participation. Often made with perishable, organic or consumable materials, they invite the visitor to an act of consumption or even destruction, or perhaps even a playful experience. Both artists are interested equally in destruction as a creative process or a social symptom as they are in the performance art industry, its seductive techniques and its manipulative language, that they distort to demystify it. [V. Th.] Sylvain Grout was born in 1971, in Bordeaux and Yann Mazéas was born in 1969 in Casablanca.
 Grout/Mazéas
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