Quentin Carnaille French, b. 1984

Overview
  • Quentin Carnaille, III / IV OZT ≈, 2023 III / IV OZT ≈, 2023
  • Quentin Carnaille, Apesanteur II, 2010 Apesanteur II, 2010
  • Quentin Carnaille, Infini II Infini II
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After graduating in architecture, Quentin Carnaille produced his first sculptures using old clockwork parts. Diverting them from their primary function, Carnaille used these to adorn jewels or accessories which, beyond being decorative, question time and the relativity of its passage, a recurring theme in his work.
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Biography
Quentin Carnaille

Quentin Carnaille has a fascination with time, figuratively and practically. He dismantles its mechanisms to rearrange its components following his own intuition. Freed from their mechanical arrangement, these tiny clockwork parts are linked together by magnetic force, hence shaping themselves as sculptures. In the Horlogerie series Carnaille finds his own intimate rhythm, turning towards the future to give his questionings a universal reach. Alongside his continuously evolving sculptural experiments (like Apparition, in which the timepieces are trapped in ice), Carnaille also explores new forms of expression through installations and happenings, approaching a conceptual minimalism fully expressed in Introspection, his first piece devoid of clockwork components. 

 

Introspection associates a refined aesthetic with the artist’s metaphysical considerations, inviting the viewer to a return to the self, while simultaneously proposing a meditation on mankind and its origins. 

Pursuing in this direction, Carnaille realised Identity in 2017. Leaving his studio and taking to the streets, for three weeks the artist’s mirror-faced cubes covered the faces of figurative sculptures around the city of Lille. A demonstration of strength, Identity transformed commemorative sculptures into contemporary sculptures, thereby arousing the public’s interest in them. Through the use of elementary modes of perception, Identity is a reflection on otherness, it is an aesthetic and mental shock and marks a climax in Carnaille’s artistic production so far.

 

In a constant quest for innovation, Quentin Carnaille’s research continues, somewhere between technical prowess and the wish to place art at the service of a primordial source, that of time and of mankind; or how to allow the latter to see the former not as an implacable enemy, but rather as an idea of the possible from which both are born.

 

Carnaille has exhibited internationally: Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Taiwan, Kuwait, China, United Arab Emirates, etc.

Events