Cecil Serres

They were born in 1991 in France and live and work between Marseille and Paris. They graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, after graduating from the Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 2013. Alongside their artistic practice, they currently teach ceramics at the Beaux-Arts de Marseille, while still working and living in Paris most of the time.
This year, their work has been presented at Magasins Généraux, FRAC Île-de-France, CAC Brétigny, Glassbox, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne and Liget Gallery in Budapest, among others. Recent exhibitions include Berserk et Pyrrhia at FRAC Île-de-France, Features of the Living in Paris and Budapest, and Double Noeud at Magasins Généraux. Earlier exhibitions include projects in art centres and institutions such as CAC Chanot in Clamart, Palais de Tokyo and Fondation Ricard, as well as artist-run spaces including Confort Mental, Passerelle and La Volonté, and Florence Loewy Gallery. One of their permanent works recently entered the French national collections through its installation at the Musée de Mussy-sur-Seine.
Alongside exhibitions, performance and collaborative projects occupy an important place in their practice. They have developed performances and performative installations with artists, performers and musicians in institutions such as FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Privas and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris. They also worked as a sculptor and set designer for Hermès between 2019 and 2022, while continuing to develop independent and collective artistic projects between Marseille and Paris.

„I am interested in animals inhabiting the shifting edges between forests, cultivated landscapes and human settlements, particularly deer, horses, goats and cattle. Despite their proximity, they often remain unnoticed, appearing through fleeting encounters and traces. I am drawn to these neighboring presences and to the ways their bodies seem to record histories of concealment, attraction, domestication and attention. Historically associated with cultivating desirable species and excluding others, gardens increasingly function, in the context of the sixth mass extinction, as conservatories and refuges for threatened forms of life.
I would like to speculate on how an animal that seems to refuse disappearing from European imaginaries might be welcomed within such a space. Throughout my recent research, a chimera-like ungulate regularly returns: somewhere between a red deer, roe deer, horse and goat, recalling creatures inhabiting medieval bestiaries. Rather than reconstructing a lost species, I want to cultivate the conditions under which such a figure might persist, be cared for and temporarily inhabit a contemporary garden.
I propose an installation combining wood-fired ceramic sculptures depicting juvenile ungulate legs, partially covered by soft membranes inspired by “fairy slippers”, temporary tissues protecting the hooves of newborn fawns before disappearing shortly after birth. These structures interest me as thresholds between protection and vulnerability, appearance and disappearance. I would also experiment with wood-firing pit as collective moment centered on care and material transformation.
The sculptures would inhabit vegetal carpets inspired by reflexology mats and composed of mosses, sedums, cork, bioplastics and solvent-free materials, gradually camouflaging or reclaiming them. Combining durable ceramics with materials destined to grow, dry out and decompose allows me to approach the installation as a modest celebration of life cycles and the gestures required to sustain certain presences within a shared environment.
More broadly, I consider this residency a sensory and sculptural inquiry into how fragile, hidden or threatened beings continue to inhabit our landscapes and solicit our capacity to notice, care for and imagine them otherwise.“