“Étang donné (Given pool) is a project as simple as a roundabout. It is because there was already a water feature on this plot, that this garden took form. Pools are often designed as puddles of water, which is where our idea came from. The result is totally abstract forms, similar to those you would find in a painting from the fifties. These are naturally abstract forms. It is a garden designed on a plan, seen from the sky, in the same way as low cost housing blocks were placed for the sake of composition in the past. The flowers that accompany this plan are not rare, they are those of a catalogue providing the best polychromatism desired. The catalogue is the palette of a painter. These are plain flowers, similar to those in the garden of a suburban house. All this is a modest project, which tries to question forms and their composition. A polychromatic project of no particular prowess". Christophe Cuzin
designer
Christophe Cuzin, painter
FRANCE
He was born in 1956 and lives and works in Paris.
All his work adheres to a process, which consists in creating a dialogue between, paint, light, colour, architecture and volume, based on a given space.
On the basis of a system of constraints that has been established since 1986, that is the use of identical formats (185 x 135 cm), a symmetrical design, a 13 cm wide stroke, along with matt building paint, Christophe Cuzin has been presenting these elements at each of the exhibition sites that he adorns with his work, considering the space and its architecture to be artistic media.
The artist’s independence then went beyond the constraint of the space, creating new relationships in terms of form.
He exploited oppositions or correspondences between “illusion and reality, pictorial and architectural space, between the painting as an image and the reality of the painting” (Olivier Grasser, Art Press, October 1993) (Reliefs, 1991). He extended this pictorial duality with space in the creation of volumes. Thus in 1991, he created a cabin from overlaid canvases he had in stock. The perception of the canvas as a painting was then turned upside down, with it inhabiting the exhibition space in a different way and enabling the revelation of the architectural space in a different way as well. Moving beyond museums and galleries, the spaces most often dedicated to exhibitions, Christophe Cuzin experimented with these constraints in other spaces and on other media: the Spinnaker of the “Charles Jourdan” yacht, the stained glass windows and the interior of Lognes Church (2000). Since 2000, the following exhibitions are worthy of note: at the Bernard Jordan Gallery, at the International Contemporary Art Fair (Fiac, 2001), at the Nîmes Contemporary Art Museum (2001), at the Pierogi Gallery in New York (2002), at the French Institute in Cologne (2003), at the Crédac (Centre for Contemporary Art) and at Château-Gonthier in 2004 and also at the Picasso Museum in Antibes in 2005.
