Gabriel Desplanque

La chambre de Dieu - Installation - 2016

présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 18

Installation


Sound installation for a desk, a chair, four plants, a pine, a couple of moving objects and thundering words.

It’s a bedroom that tells, testifies and extrapolates. It’s a bedroom that does not look like a bedroom but rather like an administrative space. The aseptic office of a weird director. In this room, a desk.

On the desk, a computer, a dancing figurine, a phone, a bell and a printer. Around them, four plants delimit the space of the installation. Hidden in the plants: foliage, lamps and speakers. In the back, a large pine plays music and spits out snow. All of them are set in motion and react to voices from the speakers.

It’s a bedroom which echoes insignificant or essential facts, combines, chops them up and assembles them. It’s a bedroom but it could just as well be any other place.
One of those places too busy to occupy the space of our human lives.

A place to scrutinize words and examine the difficulty of hearing oneself in the surrounding brouhaha. A place that constantly changes size. By turns a place for intimacy, a cell, an impersonal open space and a landscape open to the horizon: never twice the same. A place inhabited by multiple voices which add up or withdraw, cancel or amplify themselves. Voices, low or high pitched, discreet, laughing, shouting, piercing voices which from time to time tune in to sing. A choir of discordant and conflicting voices.

Gabriel Desplanque


Gabriel Desplanque was born in 1981, graduated from the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD - 2006) and the Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA - 2008). His practice explores different media depending on the subject; photography, drawing, installation, video, writing and performance are all components of his work. Language is also omnipresent in his practice and appears as a means of escaping the insignificance of the characters featured, of distinguishing truth from fiction, fantasy from reality. The human figure finds itself in strange situations, both overwhelming and constraining. His works combine performance, dance and music within pieces that are both complex and light-hearted, sorts of exhibition-shows, fairground works. He has exhibited in galleries (Galerie Paul Frèches, Galerie Mélanie Rio…) and in institutions in France (Hors Piste at Beaubourg, Musée des Beaux-arts in Paris, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rodez, L’Arsenal in Metz, Centre d’Art Bastille in Grenoble…) and abroad (Institut Français in Barcelona, Loop Video art fair in Barcelona, Paris-Berlin Festival …) His work has also been shown in two solo shows «J’ai peu d’effet personnels» at galerie Plume (Paris, 2011) and « Maison Suzanne » at Maison Zervos (Burgandy 2014). The performance for four singers and a mad dog «J’ai bâti une maison sur trois octaves» has been shown at the Théâtre de la Ville (Danse Elargie, 2014) and at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. He is currently working on a sound piece for the Fondation Vuitton.

His work is visible at this address: www.gabrieldesplanque.com

Remerciements


Sébastien Cabour, Daniel Dobbels, Ramy Fischler, Carl Huchon, Eric Prigent, Blandine Tourneux, Madeleine Van Doren, Simon Apostolou

Crédits


Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing — Métalu.net