Fondazione Sozzani presents in Paris the first solo exhibition of Sebastian A. de Ruffray, a Chilean artist whose works unfold around the notion of upcycling.

In Sebastian's works used garments are repurposed into an array of objects and installations borrowing their forms from different artistic landscapes. Sewn together and stretched on wooden frames, they become monochrome conceptual paintings; stitched and assembled on metallic structures, they turn into iconic pieces of design furniture. Hung on an excessively long steel rack, they become the upcycled canvases of raw, overly baroque, almost melodic, embroideries.

"Objet trouvé almost works as a pun," reads the statement. "Something seems clear already, the object is the garment. A French equivalent to the English idiom 'found object', 'Objet trouvé' recalls the ambivalent status of the tex6le material used in the artist’s production process: they are second-hand clothes, from extremely diverse origins, with endless anonymous stories soaking their fibers. As objects, they lose their owner and wait to be found by someone to use them again. Here, they are reused and magnified in their 'found' state of being."

Garment is not a simple object, it is a hyper object, as defined by philosopher Timothy Morton in The Ecological Thought. An object so massively distributed in time and space that it transcends classic spatiotemporal perception. An object so bonded with human existence that it is impossible to apprehend with a critical and objective distance. An object so fragmented in a multitude of other varieties of objects that it is easy to simplify it and avoid its gargantuan nature. Garments everywhere, but still garment as a sole monstrous lost object, waiting to be found in its wholeness by the mind's eye.

February 12 - 24, 2024
Fondazione Sozzani
22 Rue Marx Dormoy
75018 Paris
fondazionesozzani.org

Photo: courtesy Fondazione Sozzani