Even if many artists have called on his work as a performer such as the choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and even if his next creation should come to Brussels at the Artonov festival, Transfiguration continues to fascinate those who have seen it (the five performances in Namur are already sold out).
He played it again last August at the Brigittines in Brussels. In a suit and tie (which he then tears), in semi-darkness, blindly, with his eyes closed, he performs a ritual during which he immerses himself in clay, covering his head with thick layers of clay sometimes mixed with straw, with dots of black and red paint to make the eyes or the mouth. His body becomes a sculpture with new, strange beings constantly emerging.
The astonishing transfigurations of Olivier de Sagazan
He can become a bird, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, catch fire, also recall Christ from sorrows under the sublime music of Unless the owner by Vivaldi. In just one hour, a thousand hybridities stimulate our imagination without him moving from his place. With little cries, sounds, a painting taking shape.
“I’m amazed at how people think it’s normal to be alive. My whole goal is to capture the strangeness of even being there. Disfigurement in art is for me a way, by the very power of the images that can appear, to access this awareness”he said.
Meathead
Alongside this show, the Namur cultural center is exhibiting its recent work produced in its studio and on site in Namur until February 22. Figures in the round, between sculpture and painting, characters emerging from clay and hemp, like sequels to the show Transfiguration.
Even if, by nature, Transfiguration is more striking because life and its strangeness are there, his work as a visual artist also evokes the enigma of the living which seeks to free itself from matter. “The human face has not yet found its face and it is up to the painter to give it“, said Antonin Artaud.
A biologist by training, Olivier de Sagazan seeks what our humanity is in these deformed bodies, entwined in whirlwinds, the head sometimes buried in the wall, or the body levitating.
He cites Rembrandt and especially the distorted faces of Francis Bacon. The title of the exhibition, From the Holy Face to the Meat-Head, refers to Bacon in whom faces are no longer faces that look at us, but scraps of flesh that we called the “meat-head”.
The flashes of Francis Bacon ignited by literature
Olivier de Sagazan’s work revolves around the question of the body. “In front of my painting, I am in a ring”he said. He intends to deal with the human condition, to open the carcass.
Two videos further shed light on his work. In one we follow him in Africa, in contact with local myths and cultures. The other is a dialogue with the stylist Gareth Pugh at the opening of Fashion Week in London.
Olivier de Sagazan at the CCN, in Namur, from January 16 to February 22 and “Transfiguration” Théâtre de Namur from January 28 to February 1 (full).
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