The artist and five dancers in residence at the Saint-Nazaire Theater are preparing a new creation. Restitution of a stage of this fascinating and disturbing spectacle.
Born in Brazzaville, Congo, in 1959, Olivier de Sagazan is a trained biologist. For twenty years, he has developed a hybrid practice that integrates painting, sculpture and performance where he excels.
In his best-known work, Transfiguration, the artist covers his face with multiple layers of clay and pigments. He models, adjusts, and trusts him to detach himself from the physical world. This performance has been presented more than a hundred times among others at the Shanghai Biennial, the Seoul Moa, the Buenos Aires masterclass and Palermo. Transfiguration is scheduled for November, in Taiwan and then in Paris; in January, in London then in Bordeaux; in March in Quebec then in April in Toulouse.
Transfiguration also attracted the attention of many international artists in the field of cinema, fashion and music with which Olivier de Sagazan collaborated.
This performance served to make him known by playing in the film Discarnate , by Mario Sorrenti, starting point of a work of the artist for the video of Mylène Farmer, In the shade.
My hands for rudder
Curiously the work of Olivier de Sagazan is unknown in his city. The Nazairians waited until last year to discover fifty of his works in the exhibition Behind the Chairs , coupled with a performance.
The artist is currently preparing his new show Cor-Tex , a play for six dancers that will be given in the winter of 2019. It is difficult to account for these unusual and unclassifiable improvisations in which the viewer is witnessing a direct disfigurement of the artist. artist in a trance. "I could not bring my sculptures to life. So I decided to do it with my body. He creates a mask that he adjusts to infinity.
"We are in revolt," he said. In a form of existential anxiety. Olivier de Sagazan metamorphoses into a grotesque creature, halfway between the animal and the monster. "I do not see what I'm doing. I try, again and again, my hands for single rudder. In turn magnificent or pathetic. It can be as scary. "It is not a deadly act but an act of creation," he explains.
Combined with five actors and dancers, Olivier de Sagazan becomes for the first time a choreographer. "We manipulate the living. It's more complicated and also more rewarding. "
Cor-Tex is the collective extension of Transfiguration . He stages various scenes in which he is in turn inaudible dictator, medical examiner or artist transforming his characters in his studio. "It's not just painting and language that interest me," says the artist. I like the manufacturing process, like Dr. Frankenstein. The comparison seems right.