IT'S NOT PRETTY TO CUT TREES

NICOLAS DAUBANES

For several years, Nicolas Daubanes' gaze has been placed on singular environments such as the prison, more recently the hospital, that is to say places of confinement of the body and the mind. This interest in these specific places is not the result of theoretical and distant thinking, but rather the product of an experience that engages the artist physically and emotionally. The encounter with this particular universe took place in 2008, when Nicolas Daubanes was still a student. The experience was a shock, and since then, the artist has continued to multiply the experiences of workshops, residences and teaching in prison. His proposal is not so much to denounce a particular situation linked to the prison system as to reveal mechanisms of violence and to interest in the practices and uses which try to free themselves from these coercive frameworks. How beauty can arise from ugliness, how freedom can arise from its hindrance, how the life instinct can rise from the ashes, constitutes the heart of the artist's practice.

If the work of Nicolas Daubanes operates a lot by series, he regularly created evolutions which question the procedures and the constraints he encountered himself in place, like the new exhibition at the Maubert Gallery in which he digs the furrow of his most recent works (drawings with iron filings on glass and porcelain plate in particular), while opening up new perspectives on the question of the landscape as a memory of conflicts.

Extract from a text of Sandra Patron