Jean Denant (Sète, France, 1979) explores the human relationship between the environment and its components: context and pretext providing the basis for a reflection and an analysis of certain aspects that shape our reality. Using the pos- sibilities found in architecture, landscape and territory as tools for understanding our surroundings, Denant’s work goes beyond the physical or logical categories of location and situation to address spatial concepts through the prism of emotion, as subjective, symbolic and changing entities.

The work shown by the artist here is an ensemble of pieces of different formats spanning sculpture, installation, photography…Together they combine to function as a fragmented system (maps, models, objects, etc) that seeks to engage the viewer by inviting them to construct their own fictions and spatial experiences.

The importance Denant gives to spatial experimentation responds to how he un- derstands the materialisation of his works: as a sort of journey or traversée (cros- sing) in which the process reveals itself to be a fundamental part of his methodo- logy and modus operandi – an active medium in which to work and construct new ways of understanding space and the practices that arise from his experience of them.

It is this preoccupation for the processual, the spatial, the expansion of time in art, that demonstrates the importance that Denant attaches to the space/time relationship that the viewer establishes with his work: a relationship that queries the social, the historic, the ideological and the natural.

Jean Denant’s work, so hugely effective in terms of its plastic and expressive qualities, transcends the specific field of ‘traditional’ space and fills the clefts and gaps that lie between bodies, times and places, giving rise to new readings and diverse experiences in which the processual aspect is emphasized.