The rich formal diversity of SEBASTIEN de GANAY’s oeuvre springs from his insistent intertwining of creative genres. His works are hybrids that defy categorization, oscillating between painting, design, and sculptural object. How much design is there in the work of art, or vice versa? d GANAY answers this question by instilling pinpoint bewilderment. The object endowed with the gravitas of art turns out to be fabricated through and through: technically meticulous, flawless, almost anonymous. Everything looks “perfectly manufactured,” as though no individual intention expressed itself in the material. Scrupulously styled surfaces conceal the process of their own making; any reference to craftsmanship is effaced “so that you forget there is a creator,” as GANAY puts it. The distinction between art and design disintegrates, a strategy that lets his works not only elude all categorization, but also erases any temporal index. What remains is the pure presence of a form.

A focus in the exhibition is on the tall sculptures standing in the room, which appear to be finished to perfection yet also oddly dysfunctional. Columns, yesteryear’s symbols of civilization, find themselves transformed into enigmatic messengers from an as yet unknown future. The sculpture Le poteau télégraphique est en fleur (The telegraph pole is in bloom), in particular, takes this mystery born of artificiality to an extreme: it is reminiscent more of a digital rendering than of nature. Part Barbie prop, part industrial tubing, part ancient column, it fuses masculine and feminine associations in a hybrid creature. The motivic counterpart Vénus a un joli pépin, je dis: Vénus a un joli pépin (Venus has a lovely umbrella, I say: Venus has a lovely umbrella) continues the mutation further. Like a formal experiment, it evokes associations with pregnancy and, as an organic form, heralds life, while irritatingly amplifying the discrepancy between the supposedly inanimate and animate. The sculptural form oscillates between botanical fruit and human body – leading GANAY's play with the boundaries between nature and artificiality to a poetic climax. The stylized trees’s videogame aesthetic becomes a political statement – a digital affect created out of analog material. Absurd, lifeless, and comedic at once, it unites phallic complexion and organic surface in a maximum of artificiality. In such works, GANAY’s sculptural practice follows a logic not unlike the Surrealist cadavre exquis – the collective writing and drawing game in which different participants independently contribute fragments to a whole without seeing the larger picture. SEBASTIEN de GANAY similarly assembles disconnected individual elements in enigmatic ensembles whose meaning does not emerge until after the fact. In this regard, the artist’s personal surroundings, the place where he lives and works, are key to his comprehensive and environmental conception of art. Even the bronze cast of a tree stump in another sculpture is not merely a likeness but the exact reproduction of a real tree in the garden of the erstwhile radio station where he lives. The inexhaustible possible combinations of diverse movable pieces are the programmatic basis of his practice, which underscores the essential oneness latent in everything that as yet seems so disparate. He works on a cosmos of forms that sustain an infinite compositional potential; an archive of building blocks that, harnessed as a repertoire, allows for the greatest possible creativity.

SEBASTIEN de GANAY also explicitly juxtaposes Grid works with earlier ones such as the Untitled canvases from 1991. In these grids, he paints on delicate elements of structural steel that would normally serve as the skeleton of concrete constructions. A dialogue commences between the two bodies of work that spans almost thirty-five years and reveals that he has hewed to a consistent creative vocabulary: questions that address gestures, the material, perception. The early works on canvas grow out of a radical renunciation of traditional painting – rather than wielding a brush and pigments, GANAY used pieces of canvas drenched in paint that he applied as monotypes. The results already suggests his programmatic endeavor of thinking painting without its classical means, questioning authorship, and playing with materiality and its negation. The works constitute an bridge to his most recent grids and speak to the clarity of his vision.

sebastien de ganay