Jean-Paul Thibeau / “The bird has already left”

Exhibition Thursday 22 April 2004

Jean-Paul Thibeau experiments with the notion of displacement in numerous videos entitled “sauver le souffle (save breath).” The artist also proposes to interrogatE notions of the “device” (dispositif) and of “meta-activity.” “The bird has already left, meta-activity at L’appartement 22” is a device in which Jean-Paul Thibeau uses images brought back from his trip to India installed with beings, objects, and gestures acquired in Rabat (soundtrack by Fréderic Nogray). He is considered a multi-disciplinary artist who escapes from the “formatted” movements of contemporary art. His art can resemble the perpetual questioning of “being an artist (soi-artist),” of an artist’s modalities and activities. Through permanent experimentation, he works with an aesthetic of existence. Thus, for example, with the project “sauver le souffle” (Save The Breath) which leads the artist to circulate and to establish relationships between the Ivory Coast, Morocco, Nepal, Bolivia, and Paris, he researches a meta-culture. During two conversations in 1994, Jean-Paul Thibeau explains: “I belong to the endemic indefinition of art. In my eyes, art is neither space, nor concept, nor object. It is an inexorable movement of resistance to identity…” In 1996, he adds, “to the globalizing and a cultural discourse, I prefer conversations about beings, things, and I don’t know what…” In addition to these activities, the artist teaches at the l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence. He conceives his teaching as research and the studios in which he participates as laboratories.

* Jean-Paul Thibeau participated in the Expédition #1 Le Bout Du Monde (The End of the World) in 2000. http://www.protocolesmeta.com/