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”I address essential questions: life, death, the human condition and the social forms that shape them. In my last works, the speed, the fragility, the porosity, the ghostly aspect of the images and the materials. I transmit the pressure of the past to the crossing of what is going to happen.
My work is inscribed in the duration, it draws a path, a trajectory which tends towards the search for freedom, the release of the constraint. I try to experiment with intensity and rigor, I play with danger, mental, visual, physical, to reinforce the creative energy and transmit its strength.”
Nicolas Daubanes graduated from the École Supérieure d’art de Perpignan in 2012. He now teaches at the École supérieure d’art et de design des Pyrénées.
Nicolas Daubanes and the world of prisons
By characterizing what is reprehensible, delinquent, or criminal, by distinguishing an “inside” from an “outside”, prisons inform on the way societies are elaborated. For Nicolas Daubanes, an artist who evolves in the prison world, it is not so much this societal aspect as the individual, even intimate, dimension that interests him in detention.
At 35, Nicolas Daubanes has set himself a life project. To understand all forms of confinement, including his own, and to do this, he has embarked on a tour of places of incarceration. He observes the way humans react to the constraint of confinement and how this reaction can have something poetic.
His works in various formats seek to capture these behaviors and to reveal the behaviors that hide from view behind judgments, walls and years, to make an inventory of the voluntary hands and traces left behind.
Nicolas Daubanes acts in complicity with those who inspire him, generally in the margins and often subject to controversy; such as Piranesi, an 18th century artist engraving views of imaginary prisons, or rappers like Booba. He collaborates with anonymous and unnamed prisoners and also involves his own family to maintain the link with his family.
Exhibitions
“OKLM”, Château de Servières (Marseille, 2018); “No building is innocent”, Chapelle Saint-Jacques – center d’art (Saint-Gaudens, 2018); “Le monde ou rien”, Frac PACA (Marseille, 2019); “L’huile et l’eau”, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2020) and “Nomen Nescio”, Château d’Oiron (Oiron, summer 2020).
