Fascinated by architecture, and life (the living world) in general, I have always marvelled at the fact that all living beings have similarities. In my art, I am always contemplating upon this.

I studied medicine to learn the biological anatomy and physiology together with the psychology of the human being, however the human being is more than that, more than can be explained by science. I use art to complete the picture ...

My work always relates to the human being, either directly or indirectly. Through portraits or paintings of depersonalized humans, or through photography, videos, or live exhibitions; where the creation and evolution of the heads sculptured in ice can be seen (ice is a material that I use due to its abundance in the world of the living). Or through concrete head sculptures that can be set out in harmony with their surroundings as a “set piece” and that remind us of architecture.

I equally like to explore the microscopic aspect of our organism and the consequent relationship with the outside world, through observation and imagination. I can therefore dream of a different biological world. My work as a Doctor encourages me to study changes and advances in the world of medicine, genetics, as well as modern science. Changes that are capable of miracles but changes that could also jeopardize the very future of mankind ...

Thierry FARCY

Thierry Farcy and ‘The United States of France’

In his new series, The United States of France, the French artist Thierry Farcy (b. 1965) turns his gaze toward the USA. Trained as both an artist and a medical doctor, Farcy’s work concentrates on the human body, particularly focusing on his conception of a “universal head.” This symbol has been at the core of his photographs, paintings, sculptures, installations and performances for years and is the focus of the artist’s most recent series of photographs. The United States of France melds Farcy’s usual preoccupations with the human body – and humanity in general – with a geographic element. The artist places his heads of ice, now colored in red, white and blue – the colors of both the US and France – upon a map of the United States. The heads slowly disintegrate over time, melting and mixing their pigments to give shape to a composition that partly creates itself. Anatomically identical, distinguished only by their colors, the forms break down to create rivers and streams of flowing color, the intensity of their hues diminished.

The resulting work consists of both the “canvas-map” and the photographs taken during the work’s evolution. The geographical borders of the map remain, but the characters on its surface drift into abstraction. As in Jasper Johns’s Map, 1961 (Encaustic, oil, and collage, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Farcy’s work exists somewhere between the figural and the abstract. But unlike Johns’s map, which is divorced from its symbolic connotations, Farcy’s does not shy away from its intrinsic symbolism. The melting visages, an artistic allusion to the multi-racial and multi-cultural society that has created the United States, are eventually destroyed and integrated into the surface of the country itself. In the end, only the traces of former identities remain, restructuring a new landscape.


Since the days of La Fayette, the French influence has been an important factor in the formation of the US and its policies, ethics and traditions. La Fayette advocated a free America, without the chains of slavery, and a foundation rooted solidly in the basic rights that should be accorded to each citizen. In today’s America, with an economic crisis shaking the very core of the American way of life, increased economic regulations have pushed the American system closer to that of the French. But the French influence hopes to extend further and deeper than economic options.



The United States of France was conceived specifically for the Galerie Hélène Lamarque’s inaugural exhibition of its new space in Miami, Beyond the Body, which will open December 1, 2008.  

Thierry Farcy at the gallery Hélène LAMARQUE

The ubiquity of neuroscience and biotechnology in today's media continually reminds us of the haunting questions of our own humanity, and of our human destiny.

Thierry Farcy, an artist as well as a medical doctor, created the first of a series of installations addressing these questions thematically in 2001. The work, exhibited in November 2004 at the “Art Event” exposition in Lille (see article in the Nord Eclair newspaper), consists of about one hundred concrete human heads, 25 cm in height, arranged on the ground.

The heads, of a rough and unfinished texture, are arranged in rows more or less freely. From the eye level of the viewer, they appear as a sort of pavement of skulls. The work brings to mind several associations: the legendary stone army of the Chinese emperor Quin Shi Huangdi, excavated in the 1980s; the first human interments of the Mesolithic period, which seem a sort of nest of skulls; and the arrangements of skulls in cemeteries of the baroque era. Farcy's installations are, as well, contemporary treatments on the Vanity theme. The title of the piece, “l'œuvre de nature,” suggests the destiny shared by all humanity, death, which is unavoidable and thus natural. The title also has further connotations: like Pollock, who proclaimed, “I am nature,” Farcy's artistic philosophy is expressed in an abandonment of the traditional binary opposition of artist/nature, and in an adoption of the “natura naturans” creative principle embraced by the Schlegel brothers' German romanticism.

Farcy's installation piece “Intra Muros” (see here), is currently on exhibit in Paris. In this work, inclusions of human heads appear, like mineral ores, in blocks of cement. The regularity of their size shows their artificiality, but they are scattered throughout the stone with no other order than that of creating contrasts between the textures and colors of the concrete. This geological mimesis gives the work a dimension of timelessness, which again recalls the principle of “natura naturans.” The spatial arrangement of the blocks, irregular and en masse, reinforces the multidirectional perception of the heads. The overall effect is striking and shows a tendency towards the architectural.

The installation is a meta-sculpture. The sculpted heads, petrified in concrete that is sawed into identically sized blocks and slabs, are, through this process, reduced into two dimensions. The third dimension is then recaptured by the stacking of the blocks into walls, so that the two dimensional images of the heads have the three dimensional function of Sol LeWitt's “wall drawings.”

This game of destruction-reconstruction of dimensions, a fundamental element even in traditional sculpture, isn't arbitrary: it serenely represents Goethe's famous creative imperative of the spiritual renaissance, “Stirb und werde !”, the eternal return to life.

Hélène LAMARQUE
www.galeriehelenelamarque.com

Thierry Farcy’s work is dedicated to the representation of the spirit, which he attempts to bring into the material.

Farcy’s portraits are a confrontation between an artist and a human being, and individual barely sketched in space. The painter seems to apply himself to resolving the multi-faceted and paradoxical problem of the artist’s simultaneous distance from and identification with another being. Often the portrait appears to be at once both near and far. The head is barely a head at all, more spirit than head, almost immaterial.

He dedicates himself almost exclusively to painting faces, those last bastions of figure representation.

A window on the exterior, a mirror of the interior, and an image of the invisible.

Hélène LAMARQUE
www.galeriehelenelamarque.com

The artist has returned from the abyss, the bottomless mirror where Narcissus contemplated to the death his perfect, but tragically inhuman, face.

The face, emptied of being, has filled itself with matter. The artist has rediscovered the work of nature and now he multiplies these human faces to infinity, each one naturally deformed by random chance. A bump or a lazy eye, these reassuring defects are what render the being unique.

But the thin border between the normal and the abnormal, the beautiful and the ugly, will soon be crossed, because the face has quit the ephemeral flesh and bone for hard and enduring materials.

The irrevocable mark of time freezes these beings for all of time. They are issued from the same mold and yet are so different in their vertiginous resemblance, petrified in their expression of life: their gaze fixed and empty, yet at the same time “strange and penetrating,” like the eyes of a buried army of soldiers that the artist might well have exhumed from the other side.

Dominique DIARD,
Professor, University of Caen.

The face that has haunted the artist has returned from formlessness, incarnated in a series of generic heads, ageless and expressionless, whose smooth purity and absolute neutrality reduce the human being to the essential, to the human clone multiplied infinitely in an impenetrable multitude.

Faced with the agony of humanity created by humanity, of the human copy reproduced in series, the painter has become a sculptor to model this uniform man to the point of vertigo; the being who is not, the greatest stumbling block for the artist.

As fantasy has become reality, and science fiction no longer exists, it is now possible to clone human beings, to forget the other, the stranger, that which we are not, for an identical being, inauthentic and unequivocal.

Thierry Farcy shows us his refusal of that man, no longer imaginary, who will cause the death of the gods; Narcissus in the abyss.

Dominique DIARD,
Professor, University of Caen.