Alexis Hayère: Grámma

Espace Meyer Zafra is pleased to present the second solo show of French artist, Alexis Hayère. This new exhibition entitled Grámma, will gather new works on paper.

 

«There is a lucid encouragement to deconstruct forms in the work of Alexis Hayère: nourished by constructivism, suprematism, concrete art, or minimalism, the singular works of the French artist maintain a close dialogue with the possibilities of articulation between sculpture and painting, shapes and patterns, design and plasticity, ornament and graphic writing. A heritage that develops on porous borders, by questioning our habits of perception and understanding of certain artistic forms.

 

Confronted with works such as «Il était» and «Arbalétrier d’arêtier et contrefiche assis sur sabot d’angle”, we believe we perceive an architectural dimension, made of tension and spatial graphics emphasizing the volumes of a site. Then we enter surreptitiously into a discourse that diverts the question of architecture by extending it to the fields of sculpture and painting. This type of shift is found in all of Alexis Hayère’s creations: the Triangulated Paintings, the Painted Sculptures, or even the ink structures presented at Espace Meyer Zafra. These works can be considered as interstitial; their formal dimension rubbing shoulders with the philosophical. They invite us to circulate beyond appearance and its perceptual phenomena, in order to question the intelligible form (Morphè) that informs matter. If we speak of form, the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition distinguishes it from the aspect of sensible things (Skhèma). It is interesting to unite these two visions without excluding them, in order to capture objects that thwart our habits of perception of traditionally separate categories.

 

By letting our gaze drift into the artist’s elaborate graphic and structural games, a few questions immediately emerge: what is a painting when it engages sculpture? What is a sculpture when it is assimilated with architecture? What is a sign when it is built up in a structured form? Can we consider these categories as unstable, hesitating between interlocking and joining, allowing a redefinition of form, or even a «fusion» - term claimed by the artist - between generally hermetic domains?

 

After these questionings that destabilize our patterns of perception, our eye, like an unrolled thread, lets itself be carried away by a real writing. If we want to insist on the “written” approach of the work of Alexis Hayère, it is because it reads like an almost heraldic visual alphabet. Thus, in the series of inks on paper or in the work Triangulated Painting 00, a calligraphic dimension flows through lines, surfaces and volumes. 

 

Geometric manipulations can be arranged like a reinvented tangram game, especially in the Painted Sculptures and the Triangulated Paintings. The writing of Alexis Hayère then unfolds there by a kind of design of forms. It seems to us that the form of the things in question here is also shaped by the intermediary of signs which trace spatiality by sequences, interlacing’s and propagations, which unfold by torsion and stretching of spaces. This also allows the signs to converse with the entanglement; to the form of dialoguing with the nodes; to the art of becoming writing. It is for these specific reasons that the works of Alexis Hayère are pictured as a re-writing of the space.

 

The Shape of Things - Text by Ludovic Bernhardt, French Artist and Writer.