Philippe Charles

Philippe Charles was born in 1968. He lives and works between Marseille and Saint-Nazaire, France.

Philippe Charles’s artistic approach stems from a personal journey that initially led him to explore fundamental existential dichotomies such as life and death, decline and renewal, assimilation and resistance. After several years working in painting and sculpture, he shifted toward installation-based work, with video gradually becoming his central medium. Installation evolved into a process of staging filmed scenes, progressively eliminating the sculpted or painted object to focus solely on the essential: an artist’s sharp search for meaning in and against the world.

This questioning of the object — and its disappearance — extends into a direct interrogation of the human being, understood as someone who belongs to the world, contributes to it, often faces a hostile environment, and is bound by limits whose meaning escapes us. His stagings offer “enigmatic” spaces woven with multiple associations. At first, encountering Philippe Charles’s works can be unsettling. But beyond this initial reaction, sometimes tinged with unease, we perceive his pursuit: to undergo transformation in order to continue a path of being in constant adjustment, to escape rigidity, and to encourage encounter and regeneration.

These are the concerns we face in contact with Philippe Charles’s work — an artistic practice that is powerful, human, and spiritual, concerned less with art itself than with living the artistic act as a means of searching for and through the self, as well as proposing a rightful way of being in the world. This pursuit has led him to explore shamanic cultures, which influence his most recent works.

The object re-emerges, as a form of mediation to be perceived not only for its aesthetic quality but, above all, through its use — which each viewer is invited to experience. Philippe Charles thus invites us to a heightened sensitivity to subtle sensations, expressions of our inner worlds, of our relationship to place and to what inhabits it. His works offer us a moment of pause, a chance to detach from the noise of daily life and the flood of thoughts that overwhelm us, in order to open ourselves to the present moment.

In Philippe Charles’s recent works, the site — whether filmed or as a physical installation space — plays a decisive role. It becomes both a landscape to contemplate and a source space where consciousness is invited to embark on a journey.

Philippe Charles’ work is on display during the exhibition Fictionary, 2000.