The Landscape Opens at Set Times

Born 1979, Stéphanie Cherpin lives and works in Paris.
“If the heart of a city is devoted to a cultural and political life, the outskirts are a mass of building sites, industrial zones and hypermarkets. In contrast to the noble edifices of our city centers, the surrounding industrial and activity zones are a chaotic architectural mixture of purely functional and transient constructions. Yet the monumental profusion, the characteristic brutality of these zones, provokes a certain fascination. This is what Stéphanie Cherpin's sculptural works strive to explore and honor, in recognizing something familiar and legitimate in their existence, and distinct purpose. This recognition is the starting point of her sculptural journey. To explore and comb the outskirts of these territories. To consider their oversized dimension as an enormous atelier. To be overwhelmed by the flux of image and emotion. To hunt down spare parts in D.I.Y stores, with the purpose of acquiring an assortment of disengaged objects, to confront, combine and intensify them and create new aesthetic structures. (…) Looking at these sculptures, one can neither limit them in a given space or time. The sense of unfinished, a notion that transcends the history of sculpture, is unashamedly celebrated. Stéphanie Cherpin consolidates nothing, instead she makes exquisite propositions with multiple escape routes. Her sculptures create tension, show their teeth, they deliberately obstruct the passage and trip us up, take over a space like weeds that one can never quite eradicate, they spill over and provoke, and in this sense evoke a multitude of parallels with grunge culture. In their refusal of accomplishment, or to be confined within established rules, and stripped of any unnecessary sophistication, these works come into their own and earn their necessity to exist. Stéphanie Cherpin's work could be likened to a quote from Henry Millers Hamlet which describes grass: if it produces no flowers, nor aircraft-carriers, nor sermons on mountain tops, in the end it will always have the last word.” (Paul Bernard)