In his immersive and site-specific freehand cutouts made from lengths of felt, Julien Gardair explores how the performative act of cutting can open up possibilities of creative liberation.
Created with a single length of industrial felt, Gardair approaches the freehand cutting of fabric as an improvisational game that, over time, reveals ever-changing shapes and figures while also framing and obscuring the surrounding space. Forms that represent blades of grass, the steel worm of a corkscrew, and hands that reach out in search of touch; each silhouette lives both in the synthetic felt and in the negative spaces generated from the act of cutting. The large-scale cutout activates forgotten spaces and continuously reveals new forms and new ways of seeing.
Sasha So-Som Cordingley
French-born, Brooklyn-based artist Julien Gardair makes carpets, paper cutouts, paintings, sculptures, video, and everything in between. This proclivity for smooth sail between forms in context of specific sites globally paired with his insatiable explorations, make his body of work versatile, whimsical and layered.
