Sébastien Cliche

For over twenty years, Sébastien Cliche has developed a protean practice — encompassing installations, videos, and mechanical devices — around the notion of control, as well as its loss. At the heart of his work, with its often uncluttered style evoking an operating room or laboratory, Cliche examines the beauty that emerges from the tension between order and chaos. Loops and playing with scale (his fetish strategies) allow him to reconcile these paradoxes and generate alterations, transformations, even degenerations, which, in turn, bring other layers of meaning to the work. These subtle visual mechanisms are part of a poetics of detail, where every element, however tenuous, becomes a bearer of meaning. Throughout his practice, Cliche examines structures of thought as much as techniques, old or new, while proposing a critical reading of systems that preserve and transmit knowledge.