Chimères

Artist

Johann Capgras

Category

Visual art

How then to reappropriate a body from which we have been dispossessed, from which we have been ousted during an illness? How to accept it when it no longer corresponds to the aesthetic standards of a society where beauty is normative and unilateral. To answer this, the recovery of words and objects has a central place in my work, I sew all these are signifying and heterogeneous elements which, taken separately, convey a distinct story and / or symbolism; vice versa, read as a whole, they can unveil a new, homogeneous and meaningful story.

My theme is the bruised body, the body that has been affected by the disease, revealing stigmata sometimes visible, sometimes invisible but anchored in oneself in one way or another, the bruised body that we have difficulty in assume because it constantly reminds us of this difficult stage in our experience, this weakened body that we want to assume and sublimate with resilience and humility. My work questions the body in its double identity of living body / dying body - sick body / healthy body - hidden body / revealed body - unloved body / loved body - ugly body / beautiful body ... How then to reappropriate a body from which we have been dispossessed, from which we have been ousted during an illness? How to accept it when it no longer corresponds to the aesthetic standards of a society where beauty is normative and unilateral. To answer this, the recovery of words and objects has a central place in my work, it is the main creative material without which I cannot create. The process is similar to that of surgery in the context of organ transplants or donation. I sew all these are signifying and heterogeneous elements which, taken separately, convey a distinct story and / or symbolism; vice versa, read as a whole, they can unveil a new, homogeneous and meaningful story.

Hospital bed placed on a merry-go-round of shopping center

Manège désenchanté (Disillusioned  merry-go-round)

- Hospital bed placed on a merry-go-round of shopping center

-Set of sculptures made from old toys, salvaged objects and medical equipment

Chimeras ( small sculpture)

-Set of sculptures made from old toys, salvaged objects and medical equipment

Born in 1993. He lives in Martinique. Trained at the Caribbean Arts Campus. He obtained his Master's degree in October 2020 with the congratulations of the jury. His artistic career is rooted in his personal history marked out by several trips to and from the hospital; events that marked his body and his mind. He had to deal with physical pathologies: scoliosis, sinuous deviation of the spine, bone tumor, tumor lesions due to an abnormal proliferation of pathological cells located in the bone. So many pathologies that forced him to many hospitalizations and treatments. Difficulties linked to the medical field were intertwined with an eclectic culture of the image that was built throughout his adolescence, nourished by television, magazines, manga, the only occupations during the long hours spent in waiting rooms for doctors and long nights in hospital rooms. And begins to work around the deformed, fragmented, sculpted body, tattooed by suffering and marginalized by scars. by recovering objects, transforming and aggregating them to bring out new signifying and symbolic objects to question. He bases his practice on various solid or fragile materials that refer to the fields of medicine, the laboratory, and orthopedics. He seeks to produce significations of physical and psychological pain, deformation or alteration of the body. Thus he questions the capacity of the body to be represented as hampered / free, present / absent, suggested / traced, constructed / deconstructed, solid / fragile, opaque / transparent. By offering different experiments of re-presentations, re-constructions, reincarnations of the sick body, the hindered body, the bruised body coming back to life and to the visible.

You can follow him on Instagram @johann_capgras

Next item
Repair