THE MICRO-WORLDS OF DADAVE
Dadave freezes some bygone eras of the electronic age by producing fixed forms in an entropic dynamic inscribed in a unit of time and action.
This self-taught artist wears the clothes of archaeologist and sculptor to build his plastic research around the electronic components that collect, accumulate, dissect, assemble and order skilfully on wood support. After a first blank composition without glue, these recovery objects of a time already passed are connected again. These are cables, ducts, motherboards, keyboard keys, elements taken from cathode ray tubes, capacitors, integrated circuits ... Most of them produce abstract sculptures with geometric shapes. Different three-dimensional volumes with sometimes hypnotic effect. Some are erected like real towers of Babel composed of azerty keys, others reveal the famous apple of the computer manufacturer or the flag of Jasper Johns.
Dadave makes dialogue between the hand-made and the technology, always preserving the origin of the form and the color. Known objects with impaired functionality, now ineffective and unproductive, broaden the sense of the field of production of the digital age. Minutia, incessant race towards the smallest ... These micro-worlds are unveiled while preserving the mystery of their technicality. Where the known is transformed and where the same becomes other. It is not a question of decrypting but of being carried away by the relief, the volume, the roughness, the fragile flexibility that reveals itself to the touch. These assemblages of material variations concretize an abstract device that marries spherical or rectangular representations.
The artist sublimates their sculptural character by their redesigned assembly, reorganized by color and size. Arranged to influence each other, to answer each other, to contradict each other in their composition, their machining and their use, the components make sense together, in a new space of dialogue. The operation accesses a luminous identity, an addressed presence. The richness of the tones, the complexity of the fragments and the textures precipitates us in an enveloping immersion. A modeling of the real manufacturer the virtual. A technological approach, between the accident and the program that opens new doors and other dimensions.
The relevance and originality of the plastic vocabulary is also decrypted in aerial view. Megacities built from scratch of this obsolete computer material are like futuristic cities emerging from a film of anticipation. We can think of Arman's new compelling realism, Steven Rodrig's organic sculptures, Zayd Menk's recycled Manhattan, or Benjamin Von Wong's waste photos of e-waste.
In order to witness the history of a technology obsolete, this recycling of existing data is also an attempt to reconcile ecological and electronic lifestyles. Sorting using the past to testify in the present. Dadave's work questions memory, that of hidden data, and that of our times, which hoist these obsolete objects, stealthy avatars, into the status of works of art.
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Caroline Canault
SHORT CIRCUITS
Printed circuits showing their shameless underwear, boned skeletons of computers and televisions, Dadave's art is the joyous archeology of our civilization.
A quest for beauty and meaning from electronic waste that causes and reveals. Accumulation not very cathodic Entering the workshop, shapes and colors in the air and on the ground lead into a hypnotic round. We expected austere bits of silicon wise, here we are before reds, bruises, yellows and green tappers. Well hidden in sanitized housings, the unexpected charms of resistors, cables and other capacitors are only revealed after use. "Before any creation, I start by putting on television screens and computers" launches the artist accumulator uninhibited. Like ceramic beads or glitzy candies a little scoundrel, the extracted pieces are displayed on the shelves while waiting to form a work.
Fifty to a hundred computers are sometimes necessary to make a painting or a bas-relief. The "Tower of Character" dominating a corner of the Montreuillois workshop, like a skyscraper covered with keyboards, contemplates the construction site of a polychrome city in printed circuits dotted with light diodes. The mega-cities of vertical buildings inspire Dadave, who likes to reproduce the silhouettes elongated with chalk. The regular rhythms and geometric shapes of the electronic components combine to form urban frescoes sometimes extending over several meters. Built on the remains of everyday objects, these monsters fascinate at the same time as they scare. On the ceiling, strange stars, shaggy balls of colored threads, oscillate between the organic and the sidereal. The walls are teeming with life in electric tones.
These learned compositions of electric ducts dance and come alive. Optical effects inspired by kinetic art give a sense of movement. Dadave wants to seduce the eye before giving sorting lessons. Bring an aesthetic sense to what was once utilitarian. In the early days of Bellevillois, reusing materials was first and foremost an economical way to create. Beyond the fight against waste, the creator is admiring the intelligence and work represented by these small nuggets of technology. Once out of order, the cold universe of technology gives way to the story of the designers and the successive users who marked the object. On the occasion of an exhibition of Dadave, it is not uncommon for an engineer to indulge in nostalgia.
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David Dieudonné
