If Bernard Calet's artistic approach can take different forms (drawings, collages, photographs, videos, sculptures, installations), his work is above all the result of an attentive look at our environment and in particular at architecture, which the artist uses both as a reference, but also as a work support in its spatial, political and social dimensions.
This link to architecture is translated by the realization of models integrated into installations, some in reference to the habitat, questioning the notion of private space or by the realization of works directly in connection with the public space, where his constructions call for a minimal aesthetic, for an elementary iconography that feeds his look on the world.

Working regularly in urban spaces, Bernard Calet's works make tangible the experience of architecture, its capacity to change an environment, to act on the senses, the memory of individuals, its influence on our lifestyles and our actions. More broadly, it is also the place of the human being in the environment that the artist questions with a setting under tension of spaces, in particular by recourse to games of scale, to signify shifts, ambiguities, distortions.

Bernard Calet never ceases to invest in new practices, to invent new protocols, to put his art to the test of experimentation, and this is once again the case for his residency project developed at the Atelier Calder entitled Figurative Landscapes.

This project takes the form of a film that follows the movements of a character evolving in a series of landscapes from Saché and throughout the Centre-Val de Loire region.
The visions and sound sensations captured by Bernard Calet in these territories take the form of a vast imaginary landscape. Thanks to a technique of image incrustation, a fragment of previously filmed landscape will appear in the present landscape, which will hybridize with the old one for a moment, before disappearing to make way for a new mixed landscape, giving rise to unforeseen connections.
Paysages Figurés, refers to the question of memory, whose delicate imprints present from one image to another, offer the viewer the opportunity to mentally recreate a unique form of landscape, from the fragmented data provided. The landscape then becomes a space for experimentation and phantasmagorical investigations.

 

Bernard Calet lives and works in Tours.

Solo exhibitions : Moving Inside, Galerie 8+4, Bernard Chauveau, Paris (2022), Galerie Exuo, Tours 2020 and 2019, Random, Chapelle Jeanne d'Arc Thouars (2017) Blink&Blank, Galerie RDV, Nantes 2016, Entretemps, Contemporary Art Space, La Rochelle (2011) Proximity, FRAC Alsace, Sélestat (2003), Movie Land, Museum of Art and History of Cholet (2003), Centre d'art contemporain de Vassivière, (1999), XIème Bourse d'art monumental, Galerie Fernand Léger, Ivry-sur-Seine (1998).

 

Collective exhibitions :
Expanse, body, space, Olivier Debré and artists-architects, CCCOD, Tours (2021), I am 800 years old, Galerie des jours de lune, Metz (2020), The real disposes of its invention, Les Tanneries,
Amilly, (2019), 50 Red House for Isabelle de Maison Rouge, Galerie Metropolis, Paris, (2017), Triennale de Vendôme, (2015), Pour un arbre #5, curator Mathieu Mercier, La Quinzaine Radieuse, Piacé (2014), #JAHRESGABEN, Lage Egal, Berlin, (2013).

Several of his works have been included in national collections, Frac Pays de Loire, FRAC
Alsace (2003). Achievements for the public space: Île de la Métairie, Espace Naturel Sensible, Conseil départemental d'Indre et Loire, Centre d'Interprétation de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Rezé, Festival Rayons Frais, les Arts et la Ville (Tours), realization of a work for the ceremonial space of the Service Départemental d'Incendie et de Secours d'Alençon, Programme "Nouveaux commanditaires" of the Fondation de France, groupe scolaire Dulcie September, commission within the framework of the Bourse d'Art Monumental of the town of Ivry-sur-Seine.
Bernard Calet teaches at the ESAD of TALM Angers.

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Arborescence, 2022 - 200 x 350 x 120 cm 

(approximate dimensions) 

Branch (part painted in green inlay), monitor, green inlay jacket

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Baticalque, 2022

(approximate dimensions)

50 x 200 x 50 cm

Sewn blue layer, twigs painted in green inlay

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Connection, 2022 - 90 x 60 x 5 cm

(approximate dimensions)

Green inlay, copper fil

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Éboulis, 2022 - 400 x 220 x 20 cm

(approximate dimensions) 

Cast concrete pebbles, survival blanket

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Et puis, ..., 2022 - 350 x 300 x 50 cm

(approximate dimensions) 

Flint stones, concrete, copper, green LED, moss (bryophytes)

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Photos Bernard Calet

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