Nicolas Deshayes – Gretel (2023)

In his artistic practice, Nicolas Deshayes (b. Nancy, France, 1983, lives and works in Dover, UK) plays with the human urge for hygiene. At first sight, his sculptures, often made from steel, bronze and aluminium, appear sterile. Even polished. But a closer look reveals traces of waste, bodily fluids and other kinds of ‘filth’.

For a previous work, Cramps (2015) , Deshayes created panels of vacuum-formed plastic; an automated process, which nevertheless produced an almost anthropomorphic result. All kinds of lumps and bumps appeared in the artificial material, making it reminiscent of ageing skin. Humans may use many technological innovations in an attempt to escape from nature, but they will never truly be able to shake off their own animal nature and physicality, as Deshayes’s work shows.

The work for Eartheaters also occupies a position somewhere between industrial and organic. Gretel is a static work and yet still has movement within it. Large, gleaming needles, nestled deep in the sculpture, protrude from the lump of aluminium.

Deshayes has been inspired in his recent work by the stylised images of hair and follicles that often appear on the back of shampoo bottles, advertising healthy nutrition for hair and scalp. These images are part of Western society, driven by consumption, innovation and uniformity, which Deshayes wishes to oppose.

He does so with minimal but significant interventions. Using extreme magnification, the artist creates ambiguous sculptures. What was a cross section of human skin could also be an enlarged detail of something else entirely: a sagging mattress, a plant, a fantasy creature.

Deshayes’s sculpture is hybrid, indicating the gulf between how we like to see reality – hygienic, smooth and ordered – and the actual filth, physicality and disorder that simmers beneath.