Justin Sanchez

Justin Sanchez lives and works in Nice (FR)

By blending personal images with others that evoke collective imagination, Justin Sanchez creates situations that elude clear definition, or at least depend on what the imagination allows us to perceive. The structure of an oversized paper airplane is halted mid-flight by a picture rail. Small Majorette toy cars, stripped of their wheels, come to taunt a large Total factory. Tennis balls hover over Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle like stars — make a wish!

In a 2007 installation, the artist’s double undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis, clarifying his stance: paralyzed by a container too narrow to move in, and too massive to serve as a new body, he evolves aboard a streamlined device on a path yet to be traced. Schizophrenia or loss of individuality? The question recurs. In How I Lost My Way?, a labyrinth of corn kernels leads to an explosion of popcorn. This piece, which can take the form of a performance, engrosses the artist in the necessary labor of making popcorn — an essential element of perfect audience entertainment.

The recent series Grigris adds a paradoxical dimension to certain superstitions: anti-theft chains are assembled to form jewelry with protective powers. Between security reflex and credulity, our hearts oscillate. It is this fictional transversality that makes us sometimes face a mirror, sometimes a deterrent, or be sucked into a black hole.

Justin Sanchez’s work in on display during the exhibition John Deneuve, Gilles Desplanques, Marie Grégoire, Chloé Dugit-Gros, Justin Sanchez, 2008.