Stéphane Thidet

Stéphane Thidet collects anomalies of his own making, exploring how a visual artist can transform natural or man-made elements. His displacements, reassemblies, and transmutations become subjects of situational recordings neutralised by the absence of affect. Introducing wolves into a park, making it rain in a hut, or placing a swing under glass, he creates the inhabitable or uninhabitable, ultimately ignoring its use.

Thidet presents ordinariness reduced to signs, traces, and contours, grounded in a deep connection to the earth. Nothing is fixed or self-evident; nothing endures long enough for critical judgment. To make suns, he burns flowers; bullets on a wall form constellations. His work is ordinary cosmology in a context devoid of reason or temporality, where the presence of the human is only inferred. A dog barks. Under the lamppost, a skeleton dances.

Both dark and full of wonder, his works suggest an elsewhere, perceptible rather than accessible, confronting viewers with a new “state of things”. Often linked to childhood or entertainment, they reveal a loss of innocence and subtle anxiety, removing objects from their usual function to create a hybrid reality of layered meanings.

Stéphane Thidet lives and works in Paris and is represented by Galerie Aline Vidal in Paris and Laurence Bernard in Geneva.