In Praesentia

Niels Trannois a French artist born in 1976, now lives and works in Basel after a decade in Berlin. His practice as a painter goes way beyond the medium’s limits, extending into space, objects and photos, and opening up to joint authorship.

His work draws on fantasized images, lived moments to be shared and fictional correspondences rendered material in multiple forms. This aesthetic projection allows memories to resurface. Paint is deployed as if it were an organic substance with the ability to reveal the surfaces it covers. His pieces oscillate between figuration and abstraction by means of an invented language of signs and drawings, the use of collage, enhanced materials and fading, often fragmentary echoes of reality. Thus Trannois generates a symbolic universe haunted by the vulnerability of memory, a memory transmitted by traces and personal and collective enigmas.

Th entirety of Trannois’s exhibition In Praesentia at the Villa du Parc was inspired by the venue’s domestic atmosphere, which he infuses with delicate and amnesiac traces of a vanished personality who is presented by their absence. In the situated installations appearing like flashes in the mind, paint seeps like moss over materials and objects of a personal environment, generating transitional states, on the mental and material levels, between interior and exterior. The collaboration with other closely-attuned artists produces multiple versions of the missing identity. The exhibition experience deepens as visitors come across a painting by Sylvia Sleigh, a sound piece composed by Félicia Atkinson, a lamp designed by Polina Moroz, and work by Quintana E., a fusional entity whose members are Jessy Razafimandimby and Trannois himself.