His works suggest an elsewhere, a non-accessible but perceptible fiction, which confronts the viewer with a new "state of things".
Stéphane Thidet collects anomalies created by himself. He determines to what extent - in the musical sense of the term - and to what degree, a visual artist has the power to transform an element, natural or fashioned. The displacements he makes, recontextualisations, transmutations of matter, reassemblies, are then the subject of situational recordings neutralised by the absence of affect. Introducing a pack of wolves into a park; making it rain in a hut; putting a swing under glass; saying the "Evil" of villages: he creates the uninhabitable or the inhabitable, and ends up ignoring its use.
The artist delivers to us, without mysticism, the singularity of an ordinariness reduced to signs, traces, contours. The deep link to the earth gives this extra naturalness that pushes back suspicion. Although nothing is self-evident or in its place, nothing lasts long enough to be dissected by the yardstick of critical judgment. To make suns, he burns flowers; bullets in a wall form a constellation. Stéphane Thidet's work is ordinary cosmology, but in a context devoid of reason and temporality. The "I" is neither self nor other: the presence of a hand can only be deduced, fortuitous at best, at the bend in the undergrowth where the human has been shipwrecked or exiled, replacing the forgotten real.
A dog barks. Under the lamppost, a skeleton dances.
Both dark and filled with wonder, Stéphane Thidet's world offers distorted visions of reality. His works suggest an elsewhere, a fiction that is not accessible but perceptible, which confronts the viewer with a new "state of things". Often linked to childhood or entertainment, they reveal a certain loss of innocence, an anxiety, which, through the permanent state of tension they imply, provoke a fertile inner turmoil. Things and situations are removed from the usual use of the world in favour of a hybrid reality, which sets up a game of crossed readings.
Lauréat du prix Anna Morettini- "L'universo savonarola"23.05.2017
Stéphane Thidet lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris and the Ecole supérieure des Beaux-arts de Rouen. He is represented by the Aline Vidal gallery in Paris and by the Laurence Bernard gallery in Geneva.