Baptiste
Desjardin

Baptiste and I met in art school, at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin of Strasbourg. We also graduated the same year. Later, we both participated in The Swatch Art Peace Hotel artist residency in Shanghai. Baptiste has a very strong international profile. He's really interested in new cultures and exotic nature. He participated in many artist residencies and exhibitions abroad in Congo, Palestine, China and South Korea for example.

Baptiste likes to travel and observe the world in which he lives. He also admires Asian landscapes. The silence of the empty streets helps him focus on the city’s details. Tree branches mingle with electric cables, shadow shines through the light, the unshaped is shaped, and emptiness is no longer empty. Baptiste Desjardin’s work is incredibly poetic and meticulous. The white paper is cut by the artist’s hands and is shaped into thousand of details. It no longer looks like a white paper but like an enchanted forest or an industrial city. The hours spent cutting is just a memory. Baptiste dreams, his gesture is automatic; the pieces of paper cut form a mountain of white flakes underneath the artists’ table.

Emptiness is essential in the work of Baptiste Desjardin. It builds what the hands of the artist had deconstructed. The holes in the white paper come alive through a red wall and we fall into the black holes. Attracted by a whirlwind of details, we lose ourselves in cosmos of paper cuts. The

artist questions us about the perception of our society, this capitalist and materialistic world. What is the relationship between man and nature? Man cannot exist alone, and emptiness cannot exist without material. The forest is an industrial city, the branches of trees are electric wires and our perception is constantly deceived.

By Jessica Soueidi