Environment 12

NıCOLETTı is pleased to present Environment 12, the second solo exhibition by French artist Hugo Servanin (b. 1994) at the gallery, on view from 23 November 2024 to 1 February 2025. Servanin’s artistic practice revolves around the creation of sculptural bodies he calls Géants [Giants] — a nod to Greek mythology, where the Gigantes were endowed with supernatural powers. Drawing on the aesthetics of classical sculpture— busts or armatures displayed on plinths—Servanin’s Giants begin as molds taken from human bodies. These are then assembled from a diverse array of materials, including clay, ceramic, glass, resin, metal, and various fluids. Once formed, Servanin composes environments in which the sculptures are sometimes connected to technological devices such as water pumps, computers and artificial intelligence, through which the artist attempts to recreate the condition of organic life. In Environment 12, Servanin removed such technological artifice from the exhibition, focusing instead on a close, intimate study of human anatomical structures. The works in this exhibition are the result of extensive casting sessions involving approximately twenty models of varying ages, genders, and body types. Through meticulous examinations of their bodies’ armatures, Servanin captures the sensual imprint of flesh upon raw matter, creating casts that are then fractured, manipulated, and reassembled to create a series of hybrid beings. Made of different materials such as glass and chamotte clay, these sculptures were then subjected to procedures of successive addition and subtraction of matter, including steel powder, acid, lampblack and water. Through this process, the artist generated fissures, folds and scars that evoke the permanent transformation of organisms, conjuring the impermanence of the human body, whose epidermis is the conduit of a constant flow of fluids that are the source of life, growth and health, but also of decay. Displayed on steel plinths arranged in a manner reminiscent of classical museography, Servanin’s sculptures attempt to rework, from within, the notion of the ideal body in Western sculptural traditions, borrowing its techniques and visual language to present us, instead, with indiscernible, chimeric entities, in both mythological and biological sense, in which a chimera refers to organisms containing cells and tissues from different sources, formed by processes such as fusion, grafting and mutation. In so doing, the artist invites us to contemplate a form of post-humanism composed of ambiguous, dissident bodies: non-normative corporealities engaged in constant processes of alteration and diversification that resist systems of the control, discipline and assignation. Hugo Servanin (b. 1994, France) lives and works in the Paris, FR. Selected solo exhibitions include Morphose, Magasins généraux, Pantin, FR; Liste Art Fair Basel, with NıCOLETTı (2023); Regime Selecting Devices (Environment 6), NıCOLETTı, London (2021), and CACOTOPIA 02, Annka Kultys Gallery, London, UK (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Artocène - Biennale Art Contemporain Saint-Gervais Mont- Blanc, FR (Forthcoming - 2025); Lille 3000 - LaM off- site program, Lille, FR (Forthcoming - 2025); Orbis Tertius, curated by Arnaud Morand and organised by Arts AlUla, Paris, FR (2024); Reminder: Version Update Available, Magician Space, Beijing, China (2024); The First Stone, Galerie Poggi, Paris, FR (2023); malléable, aléatoire, curated by Chloé Bonnie More, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Paris, FR (2023); Ways of Being: A Human Dissected, Reinterpreted, and Reconstructed, curated by Jacquill G. Basdew, De School, Amsterdam, NL (2023); DAWA, curated by Latif Samassi, 3537, Paris, FR (2023); Bureau d’investigation du sacré, Les Grandes-Serres de Pantin, FR (2022); Deus ex Machina, Musée de Soissons, FR (2021); Faut-il une raison ?, Les Grandes-Serres de Pantin, FR (2021); Faire corps, Paris Beijing Galerie, Paris, FR (2020); Spaced In Lost, Paris, FR (2020); Form and Volume, Cristina Guerra, Lisbon, PT (2019); Futures of Love, Magasins généraux, Pantin, FR (2019); Notte Bianca, Villa Médicis, Rome, IT (2019); Maison d’histoire(s) (non) naturelle(s),NıCOLETTı, Paris, FR (2019); Artagon Live, Cité internationale des arts, Paris, FR (2019); and Point Contemporain, Villa Belleville, Paris, FR (2019).