The commission

In order to make perceptible the intersection of an artistic and an educational axis at the heart of the building, the work will be a set of wall paintings located in the entrance of the college and the inner courtyard of the building. It will reinvent the site, connect the media library and the audio-visual room and integrate the works already there (under the 1%. of the original construction).

The work is set into the patio and the hall in two distinct sequences that seek to show the logic of the building's construction and the relationship to be strengthened between interior and exterior.

As for the patio, the procedure (pierced by the very prominent windows) follows a principle of superposition of color layers and activation of a subtractive synthesis.

On the walls of the hall, the work acts by additive superposition.

The whole involves a random "concrete" relationship to colour... or even didactic, which takes on its full meaning in the context of the teaching college.

Philippe Decrauzat

Philippe Decrauzat is a Swiss artist, born in 1974. He lives and works in Lausanne.

Fascinated by optical forms, Philippe Decrauzat is closely interested in graphic design, cinema, architecture, music and literature. He does not proceed by simple appropriation, but prefers discrete, intertwined and indexed references ; he chooses his patterns and forms for their visual and spatial qualities. In an interview, the artist clarifies his links with this type of vocabulary: "I am interested in the direct relationship that optical art establishes with the spectator, in the way it conditions the gaze. However, unlike the artists of the 1980s, I do not seek to develop a discourse on the ideological issues that have accompanied the historical development of abstraction. Much more than the dependent on optical art, I am above all indebted to practices that question the status of the image, i.e. the tools put in place by conceptual art and pop art.

A hybrid, Philippe Decrauzat's work combines optical play with a strong physical presence. It concentrates questions of time, slippage, superimposition and is essentially based on the desire for an improbable encounter with the spectator.