Watching Sébastien Preschoux work is accepting to oscillate between the serenity of a work that can be built without hurry and the tension of an infinitely precise gesture, gracefully measured, drastically governed by a process of measuring and counting.

The work is stretched out over time, punctuated by the repeated gesture of handling the ruler and then the compass. Without impatience, Sébastien Preschoux develops the movement of the drawing in time, letting the material spread out in space. This way of drawing the line, forming the curve or stretching the line, which could be considered laborious, is experienced by the spectator who is attentive to the work in progress, as a moment of peace. Repetition of delicate gestures, without sudden jerks, the time of creation here is similar to a litany of gestures that are gentle to the eye.

We might find surprising the choice of this artist to return to the fundamentals: the hand, the body, the physical commitment. It is even more surprising that he maintains the ambiguity of his practice through the motives he invokes, which could easily pass for digital images or photomontages. For the artist, this means running the risk of being accused of being a maker because of a lack of attention to the material on the part of the spectator, or of being outdated because of the machine’s influence.

In two dimensions, Sébastien Preschoux’s drawings seem to be full of vibrations, perhaps due to the imperfections inherent in the fallibility of the hand. Yet the quality of the supports, the lines of the ink carved by the tubular points, the marks left by the compass are the physical markers that create the motif, so far from the planarity of a digital print.

Three-dimensional, the installations difract the light and find an obvious setting in the natural framework of their implementation. Photographed by Ludovic Le Couster, these pieces of wire acquire an almost surreal aspect that tends to blend the prints with photomontages. The boundary between art and craft is fluid and the homology with the digital rendering too disturbing. An uncritical approach will be misleading. The endurance of the work of creation is the sine qua non of a gentle approach to the visit, so that the meeting of the eye and the object is real, allowing what Sébastien Preschoux calls « the reward of the curious ».

Valérie NAM