For his third exhibition at the Galerie In Situ, Laurent Tixador has chosen to invest the space using materials of proximity. «ELECTROPLATANE» temporarily creates a new interior for the gallery, from the electrical circuitry to the exhibition furniture, using Paris plane tree branches, the reference in terms of urban wood, harvested from this winter’s pruning’s.

Laurent Tixador is a DIY artist and the author of experience in its broadest sense.
In his desire to work essentially with what his immediate environment offers him (which he likes to call opportunistic material), he makes it a point of honor to use simple technologies. He is less interested in the success of an object qua object than building a corpus of opportunities to test both an architectural gesture and his ability to adapt to uncertain conditions.

Tixador Laurent’s projects also involve, among other things, displacement : voyages (by foot most often) are part of his immediate experience of the environment. The performative act of walking is as much a part of his work as the informing; and his regularly updated blog invites us to follow step by step by step in his progress or stagnation.

This travel diary or ship’s log is complemented by a series of bottles containing scale models of his experiences (in the tradition of the maritime aesthetics of travel souvenirs), small carved objects or gestures of writing and drawing realized on scraps he has gathered on his way.

While environmental and social issues have taken on unprecedented importance in our everyday lives, Laurent Tixador has serenely tested his economy of recovery as he played with the materials he found in situ.

Tixador Laurent was born in 1965 in Colmar; he lives and works in Nantes. Since 2011, Laurent Tixador has participated regularly in solo and group exhibitions in France and abroad (CAPC, MA VAL / Museum of Contemporary Art of the Val-de-Marne, Espace Paul Ricard, Confort Moderne, Frac Reunion Biennale Belleville ...). In 2013, he won the Prix COAL Art and Environment.

Click here to see Laurent Tixador's blog
Click here for more information about Laurent Tixador's solo show, "Florange" at l'espace short in Nantes