The young sculptor Deshayes is in a mild state of shock when I catch up with him. We were due to talk about his slew of recent European shows and his inclusion in the forthcoming five-yearly UK survey of home-grown talent, the British Art Show, but he had found a rat in his water tank that morning and he’d just had a bath. His reaction is understandable, but the encounter also feels strangely apt. This kind of visceral collision between hygiene and body horror is exactly what his art thrives on.
Deshayes draws inspiration from modern life’s slick, polished or moulded skins – from glistening food photography to coffee-cup lids or metal urinals – and adds a messy bodily dimension to these seemingly perfect surfaces. Take a recent work, Luncheon in Charcoal (2014), shown at Tate St Ives. It uses anodized aluminium panels, the same material, Deshayes explains, that coat MacBooks and dental spit trays. Created with a Lancashire factory that ordinarily makes everything from wave-turbine parts to Pizza Hut trays, they’re imprinted with fragments of font, like ripped Tube posters. This artist has “stained” this tough surface, however, with vacuum-formed reliefs. As white as a classical marble or a corpse, their scarred surfaces resemble diseased, pockmarked flesh.
Lately, he has been keeping his eyed trained on what lies beneath, like the hidden world of London’s Tube, the veins beneath our skin or the rolled rags that divert water in Parisian gutters. “I’m thinking about circulatory systems and networks that exist under the surface of the city and how they relate to what’s under the surface of our own skin, bodily organs and vein sections and things that are to do with the flow of liquid and energy and waste,” he enthuses.
The resulting works, some of which are included in the British Art Show, have included enamelled friezes made with a company on the Isle of Wight that produces signage for London Underground. In bold, flat graphics, Deshayes’s frieze depicts torsos dressed in the city’s workaday uniform of overcoats and brollies, against bold colours and ubiquitous logos.
An echo of those Paris gutter rags can be found in works such as Becoming Soil, long tubes of metal, scaled to match a human body and enamelled in the blue and red of electrical wiring. A long frieze hanging high on the wall to give the sense of being far below, depicts a strip of abstract red, created by sprinkling glass powder on steel, and is really rather beautiful. “It congeals in the kiln,” explains Deshayes. “It looks like a medical slide or a slice of skin under the microscope.”
Text by Skye Sherwin, taking from Issue 42 of 10 Men
Nicolas Deshayes’s work is in British Art Show 8, Oct 9-Jan 10, at Leeds Art Gallery, then touring the UK
Image: Becoming Soil (2015), courtesy of the artist and Jonathan Viner, London
