massive centrale
Hubert Duprat
6 July 2008 - 25 January 2009

Curator Chiara Parisi

Hubert Duprat became known after the 80s through the aquatic Trichoptera larva – the phryganea, the papilonaceous flies so well known to fishermen, with their peculiar habit of building a case with little pebbles and twigs fixed by a silk that they secrete. By substituting what usually serves them to build their cocoons and by changing their environment by placing there gold spangles, opals, turquoises, and all sorts of pearls, the artist produced a shift that transformed the insect into a jeweler in order to reproduce a new case with the only materials available to it. The larva thus fabricates its cocoon with the materials made available by the artist.

Hubert Duprat’s work is widely present in French public collections and was shown in the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 1998, the same year at PS1 in New York, and at the Mamco in Geneva in 1999.

For some years, Hubert Duprat chose to appear rarely in terms of producing and exhibiting his work. On extending an invitation to the artist, the Centre international d’art et du paysage at Vassivière Island proposes an exhibit entirely comprised of new productions in the ensemble of the spaces of Aldo Rossi’s building, especially the lighthouse, which welcomes this monumental production, a unique re-appropriation of this breath-taking spot.

The exhibit massive centrale pays testimony to the coexistence – so dear to Hubert Duprat – of nature and artifice, compactness and transparency, in a close network of interdependent relations.

Hubert Duprat’s works make quite unique use of materials with which he experiments, but also because we are never allowed to understand them from just one single angle, whether visually or conceptually, on the confines of the knowable and the admissible. This mystic rapport is enhanced by the great technique and plasticity of these productions by Hubert Duprat. His works thus acquire a somewhat prodigious and imperceptible quality that might evoke curio cabinets if they were not so rooted in a contemporary creative process and extremely rich conceptual research (specularity, series, repetition and reconstitution). The exhibit thus offers to the heart of Vassivière Island a marvelous ensemble that reveals the richness of an artist who has never made an abstraction of his Utopias.

Copyright: Frédéric Delpech, Jean-Christophe Radke

The art center offers audio-guides iPods to discover this exhibition with presentations of Hubert Duprat's works by curators, artists, writers, critics, art historians, philosophers, artist's friends. All those personalities are shinning lights on the various issues that are inherent in the artist's work through their own areas of expertise thus giving another way of discovering the exhibition and the artist's work :

Hubert Duprat merveilles et curiosités - Didier Semin
L'invention de l'artefact - Christian Besson
Portait de Hubert Duprat - Frédéric Paul
De natura artis/De la nature de l'art - Jacques Demarcq
Hubert Duprat et le Trichoptère - Laurent Pinon
L'envers du décor - Natacha Pugnet
Hubert Duprat est à mes yeux... - Roland Recht
L'île du marié - Emmanuelle Latreille 
Cosmographies : la dimension cristalline du monde - Jean-Christophe Royoux
Des vitraux en quartz - Frédéric Paul
Minéraux et géologie chez Hubert Duprat - Nadine Gomez
Hubert Duprat. Autour du Modernisme - Stephen Bann
Les trichoptères et la troisième nature - Céleste Olalquiaga

press release