A bug's life

WHAT IS SO PRECIOUS IN HUBERT DUPRAT’S WORK, even more so than the materials he uses, is a particular relationship to time. In a series of works that resemble archaeological artefacts, he lays an entire system of Western values bare.

Like finding a pebble in a shoe, Duprat presents diamonds in a tyre. Hécatombe (2016) has the air of a ready-made, but it is the result of a long road, the jewels set into the tyre owe nothing to chance, nor to the ridges of a dirt path. In his account of Eldorado in Candide, Voltaire imagines the shock of Europeans at finding children playing with discs of gold, emeralds, and rubies as though they were pebbles. Uncut, a diamond is indistinguishable from ordinary gravel. A landslide reverses the established order of values.

A diamond is carbon subjected, deep within the Earth, to very high pressures. Its worth comes from its rarity and from the act of cutting. Duprat’s work lies in juxtaposition: “poor” materials set against those associated with luxury, manufactured objects against natural ones. It is composite work, and it relies on craftsmanship, on savoir-faire, sometimes as old as humanity itself. It is art in the oldest sense of the word: a technique. Even when he delegates certain stages, the real work is in the joining, making sure everything fits.

Duprat has been drawn to the studio space since his early days as an artist in the 1980s. He claims never to have had one, yet the idea of a workspace—a place of making, even if it exists only as an ideal or in the mind—is for him part of the mythology of the artist. From one gallery to the next, he builds studios in concrete that resemble a primal scene. Bare walls invite projection, while material is encrusted on the walls, bringing the studio in to perspective and recalling the Renaissance studioli—most notably, that of Isabella d’Este. In the Renaissance—the era of the cabinet of curiosities—scientific instruments, manufactured objects, and natural specimens were accumulated inside of a palace, to offer a reflection of the world. Over time, the status of the artist, or of the intellectual, was defined by its absence in spaces such as these; rooms for reflection so close to the world, yet set apart from it—a luxury. Through a freedom to govern his own time, the famous Latin otium, Duprat has been able to work slowly on projects in the long term, away from the bustle of the art world and Paris.

THE WORK’S MIRROR

Duprat’s parallel work with caddisflies (Trichoptera) first brought the artist recognition. He became fascinated by the insects almost by chance—their larvae have the unique ability to build an armor from materials found on the river bed, and his fascination became an obsession. Published in 2020 for his retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, The Caddisfly’s Mirror gathers the work under the insect’s wing, rather than simply reproducing it. Compiling scientific, artistic, and literary references to caddisflies across different cultures, the book is at once a way of shifting perspective—of understanding the world through a single, very small lens—and a way into Duprat’s art. The insect could be repellent to some, but by “educating” his caddisflies, giving them jewellers’ materials—gold leaf and pearls—in an aquarium, he guides them to build new kinds of casings: amalgams of exquisite secretions, relics of miniature lives. Following in the footsteps of the 19th-century naturalist Elizabeth Mary Smee, who had observed that the larvae constructed their casings using whatever was within their reach, Duprat refined her experiments and filed a patent, fearing that the luxury industry might seize upon the process and seek, as was the case for the silkworm, to industrialise it.

Staying close to seasonal and reproductive seasons, Duprat pursues the artwork and continues to catch caddisflies from the river, as do fishermen who use the insect as bait. Perhaps his work has something to do with the lure. Again, ostentation turns value on its head. The larvae’s camouflage is foiled; to the human eye, it reveals and signals—but perhaps not what one might think. Is it the gemstones and the animal’s meticulous and seamless craftsmanship that are revealed here, or rather the artist’s principle of delegation, established and protected? Unlike Huysmans’ aesthete in À rebours who has a tortoise’s shell so encrusted with gems that the animal dies under the weight, Duprat gives us not a sarcophagus but a cocoon. Rather than display finished objects in glass cases—empty, luxurious shells whose origins we could easily forget—a process is shown unfolding over time in his aquariums. The attraction to gold here merely points only to a stage of development, an inevitable phase in the history of civilisations.

Duprat’s works can seem almost hermetic, like artefacts that have survived the passage of time, but whose purpose has been lost. Le Tribulum (2012) takes form and name from the ancient tool, used to separate grain from its sheath: a wooden board studded with flint, a common sight in the countryside until industrialisation. Here the flints are instead set into floral foam. The resemblance foregrounds a tool we no longer recognise, just as we have lost sight of how wheat—long a symbol of prosperity—is transformed. Attention on the tool extends the gesture. Duprat, a reader of the ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan, situates us within the long history of humanity, an almost natural history of art which had to be domesticated as societies developed.

In the 1980s, which marked the beginnings of an accelerating world, with new information systems, and some degree of “dematerialisation”, Duprat took the side of artefacts and the long term. In Coral Costa Brava (1994-2016), he joins different branches of coral using bread, echoing the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer, who used coral as a tree in his figure of Daphne. Repetitive and accumulative, the work is a long term endeavour. Joining is Duprat’s speciality: he plays on the qualities of seemingly opposed materials, some suggesting fragility and precariousness, others endurance. In Chagrin, he cuts strips of shagreen to bind blocks of polystyrene. All things considered, this patient labour of construction and assembly amounts to little more than vanitas. The interaction of these charged elements asks what survives, what holds things together: slime and gold. ♥

Special thanks to GALERIE ART:CONCEPT