Cyril Carret’s works explore, with delicacy, precision, and often with a restrained violence, the secret arrangement of forms, beings, and things. His creative universe draws on the structures of living things, which he transposes and extends in a quest for ontological unity: in his sculptures, objects, and photographs, the organic and the inorganic mingle and complement each other. This exploration is accompanied by a greater stripping away of form and materials, favoring hollow spaces. Emptiness is omnipresent. A vector of potentialities and ambiguities, it offers itself as a reservoir of possibilities and invites spirituality. 

A photographer for many years, Cyril Carret recently abandoned this medium to devote himself to more sculptural forms. “Working with matter rather than the evanescent,” he says. However, his installations still reflect a desire to graft matter onto living things, a theme already present in his photographs. For the Cell series (2016), for example, the artist created hybrid masks made of recycled materials—ropes, keyboards, teeth, and animal carcasses—which the photographed subjects wear in turn. Like prostheses, these masks extend the human body and face, deforming, annihilating, or, conversely, revealing it. Thus, in Olivier (2016), the model’s jaw is reinforced by an animal jawbone fixed to his skull with steel screws. This second mandible amplifies the man’s power tenfold while simultaneously dehumanizing him. Mariem (2016), for her part, has her head entirely caught in a tangle of black ropes, a kind of monstrous seashell, perhaps a nest , in any case a foreign body that seems to extend until it wants to completely absorb her face. Here again, the body is both magnified and violated, amplified and objectified. 

Carret’s entire oeuvre is permeated by tensions arising from the friction of opposing forces that confront and transcend one another. The materials he chooses clash and balance each other, ultimately converging toward an open and renewed form of life. For the past few years, the artist has focused on working with concrete, exploring its qualities and contradictions. Empty Beast (2023) is a series of cement containers onto which the artist has grafted animal horns—bulls or deer. These protrusions animate these pots, which might otherwise appear merely functional. One of the oldest symbols of Western prehistory, the bull’s horn is synonymous with life. Conversely, cement, with its solidified gray paste, can appear as a dead material. 

Today, it is more readily associated with industrial constructions than with fertile soil. Here, however, life is generated, like those Paleolithic rocks from which plants sprang. In primitive mythologies, stones like menhirs were considered substitutes for the body. Human bones or ashes were incorporated into them. On one hand, the ancestor was transformed into stone; on the other, the stone was animated in a mutual relationship of transmutation.