Versatile artist, graphic designer, video artist, photographer and sculptor, Hugues Reip brings out unusual aspects of an object, a place or a situation.
Versatile artist, graphic designer, video artist, photographer and sculptor, Hugues Reip brings out unusual aspects of an object, a place or a situation. He modifies ordinary elements (notably scale) to create irrational atmospheres. “Multi-talented artist, graphic designer, video artist, photographer and sculptor, Hugues Reip seeks to bring out unusual and surprising aspects of an object, a place or a situation. “I remember the engravings accompanying Jules Verne's stories, which, by making the unreal real, evoked a world that would have a body, a time and a visible space different from ours… but in the same place,” the artist explains. By wresting from the banality of everyday objects, whose elements he modifies, scale for example, Reip creates irrational atmospheres in which the viewer confronts a universe of objects so distorted that they are no longer conceivable.” Nadine Labedade “His way of composing, or of bringing forth here and there a whole world of unthinkable landscapes, miniature or galactic, by turns enchanting or disturbing, made of projections, added pieces, collages here, magnetic illustrations there, in a word of an insatiable jumble, shows a creative disposition that plays with every rational consideration and every exclusive doxa. It is a boundless fantasy whose only rule is the pure pleasure of plastic invention, whose only method is the shock of the hybrid, and whose end is the instruction of a poetics. Hugues Reip's world is thoroughly offbeat, and that is what makes it enchanting. In the great bookish tradition of a Jonathan Swift, plastic like Max Ernst, cinematic like Miyazaki, his approach is an invitation to reflect on our relationship with nature, with our environment, and even on our behaviour towards them. […]” Extract from the text by Philippe Piguet, curator of the exhibition Eyeland at the MASC, Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain des Sables d’Olonne, presented at the abbaye Saint-Jean d’Orbestier and the abbaye Sainte-Croix.