Oneiric Fauguet
Richard Fauguet is known for works which involve assemblage, erasure, and more or less approximative transpositions… and which overlap the avant-garde spirit with manual labours, interior decoration, and schoolboy jokes.
His wall composition made with adhesive venilia celebrating a handful of great works of modern and contemporary sculpture, and his ping-pong table peppered with bullets are, for want of being classics, pieces which mark a French art scene reinventing itself in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In his new show at the Art Concept gallery, Bivalve et monocouche (to 18 April), he is presenting in particular a series of heass of women in soil decorated with seashells, and set on bases in the shape of silver cushions. These faces, with their closed eyes, scattered on the floor produce an atmosphere of solemnity and gravity and, in addition to evoking myths and legends, put us in mind of one or two key images of Surrealist poetry. This gravity does not rule out a share of funniness, not to say farce, for Fauguet is an expert when it comes to mixed feelings. With him, hommage and celebration are combined with insolence.