Jean-Baptiste Sauvage

“The art of Jean Baptiste Sauvage remains distinctly “contextual” insofar as it is rooted in a reality or a given territory, reacting and responding to them, and even contradicting them. The artist has however gradually distanced himself from the aesthetic of the fact behind his early in situ works and his first images, in favour of an appropriation or reversal of the forms, motifs and objects which have caught his attention. Through this distancing, his thinking about ideologies and dysfunctions, as can be seen in the formalization and pictorialization of our living spaces, opens up to a much wider network of references, in favour of a less functionalist but more aesthetic vision, meaning, here, meditative and speculative.” […]

Excerpt from the essay by Anne Giffon-Selle, for the exhibition A. P. 43o 11’99”N/05o 13’90” E, Centre d’Arts Plastiques, Saint-Fons, 2013
Translated by Simon Pleasance, 2015