Jean-Charles Quillacq de Quillacq

Jean-Charles de Quillacq (France, 1979) develops sculptural ensembles that are at once organic and abstract, conceptual and fetishistic, which he presents by inviting others to take part in their exhibition protocols. He has thus produced several performances, including Transport Amoureux at Triangle France in 2018 and Fraternité Passivité Bienvenue at the Palais de Tokyo in 2016. His work has been the subject of several monographic exhibitions, notably in 2021 at Art 3 Valence, in 2020 at the Marcelle Alix gallery, which represents him, at Bétonsalon in 2019 and at La Galerie, center d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec in 2018. He has recently exhibited at the Bemis Art Center (Omaha, USA), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Palais de Tokyo, the Matter of Art Biennale in Prague and the most recent Biennale de Rennes. Jean-Charles de Quillacq graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and continued his artistic training at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where he was resident in 2010 and 2011.

Through his sculptures, Jean-Charles de Quillacq questions our relationship with the body, showing how penetrable and porous it is to our capitalist economies. For his project at Villa Medici, he turned his attention to the Italian concept of morbidezza. While the French term morbide is always associated with the sickly, the Italian derivation of morbidezza in the 16th century shifted towards a positive appreciation of softness, at the same time as the representation of a new body, much younger and of indistinct gender. The softness of these reborn bodies is linked to the way we think about our relationship to the world, and Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s project aims to unfold all the positive potential of being soft, if we welcome logics other than those validated by our capitalist regimes.