TAB Event - Alain Séchas "Nuit et Jour"

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At Maison Hermès
Media: Installation

Alain Séchas is a French artist born in 1955 who works in a wide variety of fields, from special exhibitions at major museums around the world to producing public art installations. His cat characters are comic and profound, while in recent years he has turned to more abstract forms. His anti-climactic objects and provocative subjects manipulate audience perspectives and interpretations of his work within the context of a gallery exhibition space that has already been co-opted within a system.

This first solo exhibition in Japan by Séchas is made up of several of his most representative pieces. "Les Somnambules" is an installation work featuring cats that are almost the size of humans wandering around the gallery. Raising both hands in front of them like ghosts, these daydreaming cats suddenly disappear from the world of light into the darkness on the other side of the curtain. At first glance, the cats appear indifferent and artless, but something is in fact being suppressed at a subconscious level. "Nuit et Jour" latches onto this image of light and darkness through a selection of black and white works that probe and upset our memories and emotions. These cats wordlessly drag us into a certain framework of contemporary art, leaving us bewildered and stranded somewhere between greatness and absurdity.

Accompanied by the soft strains of Morton Feldman's music and blazing white neon, the spiral of somnambulists keeps circling the room...Séchas's reversal of day and night produces at once a sense of both pleasure and danger.

Community around this event

• 11 people recommend this event: pbyjp (FR), ramarama, museo (JAPON), segak1, Ashley1981 (UK), sayama (JPN), willandrews (British), and 4 others

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