For several years I have been trying to develop a personal universe, influenced by the imagery of the world of work, by setting up artworks that appeal as much to the situation comedy or satire as to more serious themes and methods inherited from conceptual art.

It often starts with a gag or a stupid game: stamping dates on a wall, blindly copying texts, dancing with ladders or barricading a podium... but it is through these absurd acts that progressively, deeper reflections emerge: stamping dates forces us to relativize the meaning of our history, barricading podiums forces us to measure the scope of rhetoric, systematizing a stupid game questions the boundary between work, leisure, chore and reverie.

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                If I anchor my works in a corporate aesthetic, it is because the world of work imposes a kind of forced familiarity, a strange domesticity where everything must be in its place and everyone in their role, carefully staged, to satisfy the slightest desire of customers. In such places, I cannot help but feel uneasy, as if I had been brought into a theater set against my will, without being the actor. It turns out that I have experience as a temporary worker which led me to work for companies without ever getting totally involved, keeping a position on the margins. This socially shifted position is reinforced by a lasting expatriation, which implies a certain uprooting.

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                I try to conceive my exhibitions as paths where we wander, like a zoo. It is in the position of a stranger, even an intruder that I hope to put the spectator, so that reality is confronted with its own image. By emphasizing the absurdity of the situations that I orchestrate, I want to settle accounts, at least symbolically, to our alienation.

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Nicolas Manenti,

June 2023