Camille Blatrix at the Centre Pompidou

The Pompidou Centre has hosted the Prize Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard award ceremony annually since 2000, honouring up-and-coming young talents on the French art scene. Every year, as part of the prize, the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard donates work by each winner to the Musée national d’art moderne to enrich its collections. A jury of collectors and art world professionals selected Camille Blatrix as the winner of the sixteenth annual Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard Prize at the exhibition « L’époque, les humeurs, les valeurs, l’attention« , curated by castillo/corrales at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in 2014.

The artist’s installation , Place Georges-Pompidou 75004 Paris, has been on display at the Pompidou Centre since June 3, 2015. It incorporates several elements that are directly planted, almost soldered, into the picture rail. One silver piece resembling a key, two object-sculptures and some letter boxes together create a composition with fluid lines and smooth, polished surfaces to give an almost artificial finish.
The work is presented as part of the exhibition  Une Histoire, art, architecture et design, des années 1980 à aujourd’hui on display in Room 25: the small, precious pieces invite the viewer to conjure up narratives that might have sparked the artist’s creative urge.
Camille Blatrix’s work is constructed and can be read as a fascinating history of signs, forms, and material, « like those Choose your own adventure books », as the artist says.
Camille Blatrix sculpts, assembles, hones, and dyes all of his creations by hand. He draws on semi-autobiographical narratives to dream up objects that are organic in form, assembled from a broad range of materials both precious and everyday, smoothing them to a perfectly sophisticated finish. The objects – clues to a secret history – are then placed in non-sites or places where people merely pass through.
Thanks to a donation by the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, the installation Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris (2015) has now been acquired for the Pompidou Centre’s collections, where it joins works by Didier Marcel, Natacha Lesueur, Tatiana Trouvé, Boris Achour, Matthieu Laurette, Mircea Cantor, Loris Gréaud, Vincent Lamouroux, Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus, Raphaël Zarka, Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille, Isabelle Cornaro, Benoît Maire, Adrien Missika, Katinka Bock, and Lili Reynaud-Dewar, the artists awarded the prize between 1999 and 2013.

The installation is currently being showcased as part of the exhibition Une Histoire, art, architecture et design, des années 1980 à aujourd’hui on display in Room 25 on the fourth floor of the Musée national d’art moderne, until 11 January 2016.