Mickaël Batard

Mickaël Batard was born in 1970 in Nantes (FR), he lives and works in Marseille (FR)
Mickaël Batard’s artistic practice undoubtedly finds its origins in the predisposition to quest and dérive implied by his name. Batard of whom? Of what? He always hesitates between comedy and desolation, whatever he undertakes to affirm this quest for a proper name, which appears across different bodies of work: sculpture, installations, photography, drawing, and CD-ROMs.
He uses all kinds of materials, objects, and images, assembling them into unstable, constantly evolving systems: somewhere between high- and low-tech, a nebulous practice (radioactive, inevitably) in perpetual “morphing.” He practices the city, searching for acidic fallout, down on the ground, at the junction between floor and wall, where the rubbish bin is put out; dragging his shopping trolley is, in a certain way, connected to the experiences in urban space inaugurated by the Situationist dérives: a playful-constructive behaviour that leads him either to correct chance or to pursue it out of necessity.
Preferring, one evening, between day and night, to “find material” in Marseille, taking the cluttered pavements of the little street called “Son Plaisir,” rather than crossing the square of some general, too empty and brightly lit.