Stéphane Spach

Diptych. Aristoloche et autre chose, 2019

Diptych. Aristoloche et autre chose, 2019

From the diptych Aristoloche et autre chose

Stéphane Spach gleans and collects. He subtracts the set, fixes, and repeats. If the rehearsal highlights the necessity of subtraction, it has however another vocation not to confuse the singularity of the object with the ideality of its form. These gestures are part of a poetics of the taxon. Paradoxically, it is never the same one that is repeated. Rather, the insistence of the variation.

Stéphane Spach subtracts the decor or only plants one to better reveal the contours and the naked materiality of the object. It is almost always a question of unbinding the object, free it from its bonds, in order to (make it) see differently (make it feel, touch differently, because these objects thus seized are full of nicks, folds and scratches). Then the familiarity – or lack of it – of our relationship with him begins to surreptitiously to waver. Unheimlichkeit: the familiar worries, and that’s how it arouses, that it almost forces, attention.

The particular attention he pays when he captures landscapes is just another part of this work, which aims to produce the framework for a celebration of the ordinary. A banality – of places, of the elements that make them up -, which is at the threshold of our familiar eyes, their absence or erasure.

Extract from spach-fine-art.com, biography written by Alexis Zimmer.