French artist Éric Baudart (born 1972) has been developing since the early 2000s a singular body of work that subtly questions the boundaries between sculpture photography and installation. His approach recalls that of the "flâneur artist" as defined by Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life (1863): "[an artist] of circumstance and of all that it suggests of the eternal."
Baudart pays close attention to objects and debris drawn from post-industrial urban life: mattress springs the blades of an obsolete and worn-out fan layers of concert posters or even the mechanism of a children's toy. With just a few simple gestures—applying a color introducing a slight distortion or simply displacing the object from its usual environment into the artistic sphere—the sculptor reveals the aesthetic and poetic potential of these elements. His body of work oscillates between diverse references and aesthetic logics: chemistry scale displacement monochromy the rejection of composition the interplay of raw materials and their surfaces transformations caused by use or decay and the effects of physical phenomena and natural forces (light, dust, abrasion, projection). His practice engages in a dialogue with art history traversing the legacy of the readymade minimalism arte povera and pop art without ever being reduced to them. Thus his pieces draw upon repetition wear light dust and gravity to produce forms in which alteration replaces composition and where the past use of the object remains perceptible. They embody an attentiveness to invisible forces discreet rhythms and the slow transformation of things.
His work regularly exhibited in France and abroad is now part of major public and private collections.