1968

How does one sculpt without being a sculptor?

In releasing your work from yourself.
Rule number 1: develop an idea of the sculpture.
Rule number 2: copy this idea just until it is no longer recognizable. Organize a meeting between its desires and the surprises of the material. Enthuse before the unexpected. Applaud chance. This is what is called the child's apprenticeship.

J. BTESH is the example of this apprenticeship. The brute master of the art, undominated by any academic technique: He knows perfectly not to shape, refuses with virtuosity to hew the stone, excels in mistakes, does anything but paint with his paintbrushes. Each day he perfects the art of unlearning.

J. BTESH thus unuses objects, treats noble materials with a lack of formality while revering the ordinary, renders invisible that which jumps before the eyes, voids the visible, fixes his attention on the disregardable, multiplies the singular, disobeys the laws of gravity, goes against the norms, dupes those who dupe us. Unceasingly, he writes without words, carves up the emptiness, unfolds that which is smooth, complicates the simple. His rage against the materials is that of a man who takes apart the real to better astonish himself. Why? Renan, sculptor of books, said it better than anyone: "The truth may be sad"

For the works of BTESH are, above all, works of astonishment. His asceticism is to amuse himself, to refuse with gaiety the doom and gloom of our times. He doesn't deny its existence. He laughs at it. His joy is to amuse himself with everything he integrates into his path: artisans, creators of divers artistic spaces, salvage dealers, other artists. Does he take them seriously? Mostly he mocks them and carries on with his game. Does BTESH work? This adult term supposes that he's looking for responses; yet, all he hopes for is questions.


Alexandre Jardin

Handling paradoxes and playing with the ambiguities of sense is not a simple task. This however is what is proposed by the meticulous work of J. BTESH.
In this proposition made by a "complete artist" (sculptor, photographer and philosopher), musical instruments, billboards, printing presses and technological objects are suggested by the works while the referential background bears influences of Pop Art, cinema and of music.

It was in 2001 that J. BTESH had the project of creating a hundred objects whose conception originates in an original relationship with language and philosophy. Starting with recovered printing slugs elements that had been condemned to death as old industrial waste - BTESH first practices an "industrial archeology" and then goes through a complex process to elaborate the objects: a kind of "complement of competence" in collaboration with professionals who master the savoir-faire of industrial glass-blowers, lock-smiths, mirror-makers.

Various elements are thus set against a background of rusted metal and inlaid: glass, photography, printing slugs, and mirrors. The printing slugs find new life in reconstructed phrases. The letters hang from steel cables and are reflected in a mirror, indispensible to read these "manifesto-phrases" fraught with philosophical meaning. The choice of English signals the belonging of artists to the global system where BTESH defines himself as "a citizen of the world".

A lighting device, hidden in the object's structure, gives supplementary life to the elements on its surface. The light plays with the transparency of the glass, highlights the cracks in the metal, and spills out beyond the contours of the mirror.

But the first art-pieces also serve as the "matrices" of a second creative process. This series initiated in the summer of 2006 with the artist's desire to move towards a "simpler and purer form". The text of the initial object, isolated and photographed, becomes the unique reference for the realization of luminous boxes in polished stainless steel. photography, used as material in the first series, now becomes the device of a technical reproduction. The autonomous existence of the sentence in a different space, freed from its relation to the mirror, becomes possible.

To give new life to the printing slugs, to sublimate these objects which new technologies have rendered obsolete, this is the central paradox and the motor of BTESH thought-process.

In appropriating the traces of industrial modernity, this modernity which has enticed so many avant-garde artists to look for material in emerging plants at the beginning of the 20th century, the artist operates subvertions, displacements and transformations in his search of "something organic" and thus inscribes himself in a contemporary dynamic. Because at the same time, still paradoxical, the organic is submitted to a sort of formal abstraction where the minimalistic traits point to the frontier between art and design.

Fabiana de Moraes
… Read More