Daniel Firman

Daniel Firman's work takes spectacular forms, always bringing us close to breaking point. In his hands, a perfectly unusual or incongruous object, attitude or situation becomes a tangible reality, a “grey area” to be explored. Ignoring trends and fashions, the artist ensures that the viewer immediately sees what is going on, while basing his work on profound reflections on gravity and movement.

“When I was a teenager, I was hesitating between dance and architecture, but circumstances led me to art school. After a few years, I realised that sculpture was the medium that could fulfil my artistic desires. For me, it's somewhere between dance and architecture, and that’s why the question of physical space is essential to my work. Weight, gravity and mass are all subjects I work with,” he explains.

From the beginning, Daniel Firman has always worked on bodies. Bodies that move, make, wear, throw... Bodies that perform. Through this, he questions the relationship between humanity and its environment. His carefully considered protocols of production, his interests in various non-artistic fields such as economics and science, and the way he plays with the viewer's mental projections reveal a highly conceptual way of thinking, always interacting with reality and working to adjust the balance and establish counterpoints. For Daniel Firman, the result is never predetermined and surprise is always to be expected.

Trained in sculpture at the Beaux-Arts, he loves nothing more than to baffle, invert and create hybrids, seeking to develop "a period of confusion for the viewer: a point of suspension in time". Projects are then divided up and reassembled according to invitations and exhibition venues. The artist does not allow himself to be boxed in by preconceived ideas. It is not enough to talk about his “suspended time” or the hyperrealism of his sculptural objects. You have to rely on the senses and feelings.

“Daniel Firman's works are difficult to define unequivocally: they are at once humanised and inhuman, realistic and illusory, disturbing and playful. Sometimes pop art, sometimes minimalist, they escape over-simplifying terms. His artistic practice stems from performance and interaction with the space and the body. The first sculptures by this French artist were created from photographs documenting his own movements in dance,” explains art historian Magdalena Zieba-Grodzka.

For one of his most iconic series, Daniel Firman replaced the human body with that of Earth's largest mammal. The Éléphant series is a specific interpretation of space, not as a physical reality, but as the medium for a vision. Usually, the body is by nature subject to gravity and “glued” to the ground by its lower limbs. Here, Daniel Firman puts forward an alternative, using the base of the elephant's trunk as a possible surface for adhesion. With the trunk as a point of support, the artist flips the volume of the animal and transforms our ordinary vision of this prehensile appendage, as the pachyderm is captured in an extraordinary position of balance.

Installed beneath the Stables Canopy, Daniel Firman's new elephant projects us into another world, a world without gravity. Like a "disturbance of gravity", as the artist likes to say, the phenomenon challenges notions of up and down, horizontal and vertical. When Daniel Firman asked a scientist about the circumstances that would make such a position possible, he got three hypotheses: the elephant is in orbit 18,000 km from the Earth, or it is on a planet smaller than ours, or it is on a gas giant! In any case, the improbable position convinces the eye that it is a freeze frame. There can be no doubt that the animal was caught mid-dance - to everyone's amazement and wonder.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

FRANCE