Sur les toits

“How beauty can arise from ugliness, how liberty can be born from its hindrance, how the life force can be resurrected? It seems that this reflexion is in the center of Nicolas Daubanes’ practice: the revolt and the resistance to coercive systems of the society but also the willingness to escape from them, the desire to invent some new practices, other customs, to reveal a driving force that frees from deadly frames.” Sandra Patron, director of MRAC Serignan.

Accumulating immersive artist residences in prisons, Nicolas Daubanes focusses on key issues: life, death, the human condition and its social forms. From steel powder drawings to monumental concrete sabotaged installations, the artist is interested in the combined time of suspension and fall: it is to see, before the destruction, the life force. “I try to experiment intensity and rigor; I play with mental, visual and physical danger. I always choose to balance form and content in a subtle way. For instance, sugar added to concrete illustrates the failed gesture of the French ‘Resistants’ during World War II. The iron filings that I use in my drawings symbolize the prison bars as well as the files that enable a prisoner to escape…”

Nicolas Daubanes (b. 1983, FR) lives and works in Marseilles (FR). In 2020/2019, he benefits from personal exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo (He won the 2018 Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo), at Chateau d’Oiron and at FRAC PACA. Previously, Nicolas Daubanes exhibited in many institutions such as MONA (Australia), Villa Arson, les Abattoirs (FRAC Occitanie Toulouse), FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, MRAC Sérignan (FR)… Nicolas’s work is part of important private and public collections such as FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, FRAC PACA… He won the 2017 Occitanie Grand Prix of Contemporary Art and of the 2017 South Mezzanine Prize / les Abattoirs.