Thierry Farcy
Artistic Approach
For many years, Thierry Farcy has been developing a narrative. Each work logically calls for the next, forming a whole that can be understood as a continuous story.
Through drawing and sculpture, the artist addresses the living world, focusing in particular on two of its defining characteristics: its permanence through change, and the shared nature of beings once their origins are considered. Although he produces still images (in two dimensions or in volume), movement runs throughout his work. Drawing allows him to capture the fleeting nature of mutation through blur and imprecise lines, conveying to the viewer a sensation rather than a factual observation, as photography might do. To signify a change of state is to point toward the very essence of life itself: matter in constant metamorphosis.
Sculpture approaches the same questions in a different way. Less volatile than a pencil stroke and requiring direct confrontation with material, it compels the artist to dissect blur and imprecision in order to reveal the mechanisms of transformation. It is as though Thierry Farcy seeks to bring this blur into focus, to grasp the workings of a nature that mutates before his eyes. This process takes shape through the accumulation of fictive traces—elements he fragments, separates, and recomposes. Life is precisely this: a leaf falling to the ground, absorbed and transformed into organic or mineral matter among other bodies.
When brought together within a scenographic framework, drawings and sculptures offer two perspectives on the same subject, highlighting all of its facets. It becomes clear why, in the artist’s practice, one continually feeds the other.
From the outset of his artistic research, the artist deliberately imposed constraints upon himself: a restricted palette centered on the richness of grey tones, and the repeated use of a single figure—the head, both a differentiating feature and one shared by all. Though he occasionally departs from these rules, he considers them sufficient tools to focus his discourse and develop his thinking. Thus emerge installations in shades of grey, black, and ochre, forming accumulations of faces—identical from afar, subtly different up close—at times fragmented, at times buried, or faceted. While an isolated sculpture on a pedestal invites contemplation and escape, Thierry Farcy’s installations activate the viewer’s mind, calling for an engagement with the work, its composition, and its context of display, and generating a physical involvement with the piece as an environment.
In The State of Painting and Un voile pour le mariage de la vierge, the artist turns to video, transforming his heads into sculptures of ice whose melting is captured by the camera. Moving from solid to liquid, these states of water resonate with the image upon which the ice rests.
Moving between archaeology and biology, the artist underscores our genetically close origins—a way of restoring our rightful place on this earth and within the universe. On the threshold of transhumanism, it is possible that the story Thierry Farcy is sketching for the future will reveal our desires for immortality and timelessness, another way of approaching change: attempting to master it.
Ultimately, the artist’s work is a paradox: it speaks of the immutability of change.
Virginie Baro, gallerist
BIOGRAPHY
Thierry Farcy, a visual artist, was born in Vire on 17 April 1965.
He currently lives and works in Caen.
From 1987 to 1992, he attended evening classes at the Caen School of Fine Arts alongside his medical studies.
Medicine helps him understand the “mechanical and biological” workings of the human being, while his artistic practice opens a more intuitive and more profound dimension of Humanity.
From 1994 to 2002, Thierry Farcy began his first series of paintings, Generic Portraits, seeking to reveal what human beings share in common. The emergence of a face on these canvases evokes the origins of life.
In 2001, he tackled the issue of human cloning through installations composed of resin heads placed in a game-like situation—without any discernible rules—mirroring researchers who attempt to develop cloning techniques without even knowing the rules of the living. During this same period, he also developed several series such as Intermediate States, Memory of the Self, and a polyptych of nineteen canvases: Emergence.
From 2002 onwards, his work took another turn: he began making sculptures of generic human heads in ice, which later led him to an interest in photography. Thierry Farcy chose this material for its ephemerality—like life itself—since water constitutes most of the living world.
It was also from this period that he began producing cement sculptures, sometimes arranged as installations. This new material allowed him to create magma-like forms by incorporating cement heads into the same matter. Working with a stonecutter, he cut into these masses from which the fossil-like heads emerge: The Work of Nature (2002), Intra Muros (2004), Column (2006)…
In 2007, a retrospective was devoted to him at the Museum of Fine Arts in Alençon and across the city (see the exhibition catalogue), and that same year he took part in Nuit Blanche in Paris. The following year, he returned to drawing (without abandoning his other media) and began a long-running series entitled Improvised Anatomies. These drawings explore an imaginary biology, ranging from microcosmic anatomy to poetic dissections. Strange forms appear, whose true nature can never quite be determined.
From 2011 to 2014, he worked on a series of drawings, And Me…, made up of hybrid forms imagined from vanished—or still-existing—creatures, human or animal… At the same time, he developed his sculptural work along another line, connected to a fictional archaeology.
Thierry Farcy has also taken an interest in video and has produced several works, including: A Veil for the Marriage of the Virgin (2006); The State of Painting (2008); The Life of Flowers (2010).
Since 2015, he has been developing the Cosmos installations, in which—through a play of light—he sets realistic drawings in dialogue with organic or archaic forms.
In the same spirit, since 2017 he has been creating a series of drawings, The Garden of Breaths, playing between reality, microcosm and macrocosm, where the mineral world becomes biological and alive…
Cosmos and The Garden of Breaths were presented at the artistic experimental site Le Village during the summer of 2018.
February 2023: the contemporary art blog AATONAU dedicated an article (in English) to Thierry Farcy’s work.
“Unmasked”, Thierry Farcy exhibition, 7 July–16 September, City of Falaise.
Sincerity is, I think, the finest quality one can perceive in visual art—not as a way to please, but simply to exist as such. Work that does not aim to seduce, provoke, or decorate, but instead crystallises the artist’s expanded thinking. That is what one feels when facing Thierry Farcy’s work.
Thierry is a physician. He is interested in the body and its mechanisms, but above all in the head in his creations. The standardised human head then comes to encompass everything the human stands for—its essence, its trajectory. A kind of questioning decapitation: like a living being wondering how it could become an object, and then an object wondering how it could become pure matter. Thought seems to contract in front of these works, to round itself off before Thierry Farcy’s aesthetic—an aesthetic always under tension, between the sordid and the brilliant.
This itinerary of works, spread across three sites in the town, begins within the walls of William the Conqueror’s Castle, where three large-scale installations created for the exhibition offer new perspectives on the medieval architecture. The first, Unmasked, is a plinth of concrete blocks topped with cement heads, set alongside a garden. It answers a second work facing a panorama over the town, Rampart, which raises up a new community of heads emerging from the mass. The third work, Forecourt, is an ensemble of slabs bearing sections of faces. Like minimalist sculptor Carl André, Thierry Farcy brings modular composition and sculpture-as-place into play: Forecourt is a walkable work that the viewer can step onto.
These three installations echo the castle’s architecture, whose construction elements remain legible. The raw modern material converses with the brutality of time, which reshapes landscapes.
At the André Lemaitre Museum, Thierry Farcy presents more traditional media: painting and bronze sculpture. A series of nineteen “monochrome” canvases stretches like a vast colour chart along the gallery wall. These paintings are self-portraits: once you move beyond the barrier of the coloured surface, a face comes into view.
Inside the museum, among André Lemaitre’s paintings, the Hostages series rises on a set of plinths. Here the faces are in bronze, made for the exhibition, resembling ancient masks—splintered, broken, fragmented. Contemporary archaeological remnants, or witnesses to a future in which the human face will suffer its own collapse, these sculptures crystallise a fascination with fragility—and, above all, with the eternity of our existence.
La Fresnaye Castle brings together most of the artist’s work and provides a particularly compelling setting for materials to converse. The visitor is greeted by another outdoor sculpture made of assembled slabs—a kind of passage leading into the heart of the exhibition. Then opens a cabinet of curiosities, with old display cases populated by faces in every form. There is the Faceted Stones series, in which cement is cut like a diamond, revealing smooth, gleaming surfaces. Works from the second series, Forgotten Encounters, offer a multitude of views of Thierry Farcy’s favoured form. Sliced, chiselled, broken, they seem to have lost all life, becoming admirable objects behind glass, still bearing the traces of an artistic violence.
The back panels of the shelves are lined with black sand—a material the artist uses to tint the cement—forming dunes in places and suggesting a context of unreality.
At the centre of the cabinet, a set of black-and-white cement cubes from which heads emerge forms a chequerboard, like a chessboard in which the figures would be absorbed by their own field of play.
On the ground floor, two cubes and a sphere reappear, still adorned with faces, presiding like familiar objects of the château. The sphere—like a decorative cannonball—has settled naturally in front of the window and catches the daylight. The staircase is dressed with two sculptural installations on concrete blocks, a nod to the works at William the Conqueror’s Castle. On these massive bases stand two groupings of heads—Conversation and The Voiceless—which seem either to rise out of, or to sink back into, their support. At the turn of the stairs, the château takes on the air of an enchanted place where the characters have been frozen by some spell. A fantastical tale begins to take shape, and the pieces seem to whisper their story.
Upstairs, a series of drawings floats across the wall: the Improvised Anatomies, which the artist describes as “poetic dissections,” and two large installations, Between Us 1 and 2, unfold in two parallel rooms. Like the vestiges of a partially vanished city, they are topped respectively by a taxidermied bird and a taxidermied fox—once again encouraging an imaginary, wondrous narrative.
An adjoining room contains a fireplace from which hundreds of terracotta face fragments spill out—charred pieces that also construct a narrative strand within the exhibition, darker and more sordid. Two photographs showing ice heads in which images of medieval architecture are reflected seem to converse, evoking memories—reflections of the past.
A final room, used throughout the summer to celebrate weddings, is adorned with four large drawings from the series And Me…. Each drawing highlights part of an imaginary body, reworked by the artist from medical images of some of his patients. One can no longer say whether the physician is an extension of the artist—or, ultimately, the other way around.
The selected drawings from this series, like a set of relics, carry within them symbols of life and human existence, and may become precious objects within a space where several unions will be celebrated. The finale therefore turns toward the living—toward the breath of drawing, which is often at the origin of every artistic practice, like a return to the source.
The exhibition is conceived as a journey through a distant temporality. From the Middle Ages to Antiquity, passing through the time of the fantastical tale and the 18th-century cabinet of curiosities, Thierry Farcy’s work remains profoundly contemporary, because it belongs to an aesthetic present that is at once futuristic and medieval.
It synthesises: from death masks to decapitations, to the mental fractures that are ours today—the human face has taken many forms throughout our history.
As a lasting symbol of our absurd, dense, fragile humanity—questioning itself, destroying itself, yet continuing, again and again, to emerge—Thierry Farcy’s works confront the great existential questions that shape us and compel us to create.
Mathilde Jouen, PhD in Aesthetics, Art Sciences and Technologies
July 2018
“In the Shadow of the White Cities”, an exhibition with Isabelle Maarek, at the Museum of Fine Arts and Lace in the city of Alençon.
“The series of sculptures that makes up The Cabinet of Hybrids, or Vanities, echoes the cabinets of curiosities assembled in the 18th century—early prototypes of modern museums—treasure chests of heterogeneous collections ranging from relics of Classical antiquity to taxidermied specimens brought back from distant horizons, as well as contemporary pieces of machinery.
Thierry Farcy’s works focus on the human being, reduced by synecdoche to its purest expression: the head—a theme the artist has favoured since the 1990s. Drawing on a variety of techniques and media, these pieces present humanity as a remnant, displayed like souvenirs from the exploration of unknown lands, through the use of tablet-like supports and glass globes.
The treatment of the faces—combining rough and carved surfaces—evokes ancient statuary in marble, bronze, or ceramic: at times an Egyptian funerary bust, at times a Greco-Roman tragicomic theatre mask—like an archaeological discovery. The patina on other works suggests the fossilised bones of early humans. Yet there is no clear reference anchoring them in a specific time or place; we are confronted with an imaginary past, or a utopian projection.
This ambiguity is reinforced by the transformations undergone by the material itself. Features emerge from partially sculpted blocks; heads are cut and recomposed, or fragmented and reassembled—without our being able to tell whether we are witnessing an apparition, an incomplete materialisation, or a dislocation brought about by the wear of time. Humanity nevertheless remains an object of study, dissected almost surgically.
The solemn—or at the very least uncanny—tone that emanates from these works is offset by the inclusion of toy animals and insects: disconcerting, offbeat elements in Forgotten Encounters. Full of humour and irony, this series questions our relationship to death and nature, and our place within the chain of life. The roles seem reversed, and humankind becomes the curiosity of the animal kingdom.
The faceted stones, for their part, point to the mineral world. The “Diamond of Alençon”—a name now abandoned for the smoky quartz found in the bedrock of the Orne—served as an inspiration for Thierry Farcy. Matter is shown in all its states, from the rawest to the most polished: a tribute to stonework that conveys the preciousness and fragility of life.
Thierry Farcy’s three-dimensional assemblages form an architecture suspended between construction and deconstruction, between foundation and ruin. Their modules can be combined infinitely, offering an image in perpetual motion. The installations Between Us and Alliances may be read as an archaeological state of our societies—an unstable stratigraphic vision of human history—in which anonymous heads, sometimes reduced to a few traces or impressions, reveal so many slices of life. They also symbolise humanity’s aspiration to rise, while still leaning on its past. Genomic Composition reflects Thierry Farcy’s affinity for the life sciences, and more specifically for the emergence of living forms. The combination of fragmented heads creates a metaphorical DNA chain—an evolving genetic architecture of earthly creatures.”
Johanna Allouch
Heritage Curator
2015
“The living world and the origins of life on Earth are another of Thierry Farcy’s key themes. Speaking of the Improvised Anatomies series, the artist describes it as ‘a kind of poetic dissections.’ The works can thus be approached as anatomical plates depicting small, indefinable hybrid entities, borrowing from the human and the animal, the vegetal and the mineral. The incisive draftsmanship lends a sense of life to inert elements and seems to capture matter in a state of evolution. The precision of the line recalls the classical tradition of the écorché. In the And Me? series, the monumental scale of the drawings disrupts our perception of teratogenic forms. These shifts in scale resonate with medical imaging, and that frame of reference heightens the illusion of reality of these chimerical creatures. The whole evokes a gallery of comparative anatomy, in which these deceptively naturalistic plates seem to trace the evolution of species.”
Johanna Allouch
Heritage Curator
2015
“Thierry Farcy lives and works in Caen. After studying medicine and attending art school, he brings these two backgrounds together in a body of work rooted in the exploration of the human body. His enigmatic cement heads—mute, like so many cloned faces—come to colonise the omnipresence of the busts in the Musée Saint-Raymond’s permanent collection. Unlike those, painstakingly identified through the work of historians and archaeologists, Farcy’s heads claim no identity other than belonging to the human species, preserving a mystery deeper than artefacts whose origins have been established—like traces from an age too distant to be recognised.”
Samuel Pivo
Thierry Farcy at Galerie Hélène Lamarque
The prominence of neuroscience and biotechnology in today’s media keeps bringing us back to the insistent question of what makes us human—and to the haunting matter of our human destiny.
Thierry Farcy, an artist and a medical doctor, explored this question as a central theme as early as four years ago: in 2001, he created an initial series of installations built around a group of roughly one hundred concrete male heads, 25 cm high, always placed directly on the floor and shown at the Art Event fair in Lille in November 2004 (see Nord Éclair).
These raw heads, aligned in rows in a more or less free arrangement, are seen from the viewer’s eye level as a kind of paving of cranial boxes. They evoke, in turn, the legendary army of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi unearthed in the 1980s; the earliest Mesolithic burials—like nests of skulls; or the rows of skulls found in Baroque-era cemeteries. In this sense, these installations offer a contemporary treatment of the theme of Vanitas. Humanity’s equal fate—its inevitable, and therefore natural, death—becomes, indeed, an “œuvre de nature,” as suggested by the title Farcy gave this installation. The title’s ambiguity goes further still: like Pollock, who declared “I am nature,” Farcy states his artistic credo by setting aside the traditional opposition between art(ist) and nature, and by embracing the creative principle of natura naturans so dear to German Romanticism, notably the Schlegel brothers.
In the installation Intra Muros, presented today in Paris, inclusions of human heads appear—like nuggets—embedded within cement blocks. The blocks are artificial in their regular, standardized dimensions, yet they are arranged without any predetermined order, other than the desire to create contrasts between the surfaces and tones of the concrete. This geological mimesis lends the work a sense of timelessness, once again referring to the principle of natura naturans. The semi-irregular, massed spatial arrangement of these blocks intensifies the multidirectional perception of the heads in a dizzying effect, and carries an architectural ambition.
This installation is a meta-sculpture: sculpted heads, frozen within concrete that is itself cut with a saw into blocks and slabs of identical size, are—through the process of cutting—reduced to two dimensions. The third dimension is then reclaimed by stacking the blocks into low walls, so that the two-dimensional images of the heads take on the three-dimensional operation of Sol LeWitt’s “wall drawings.”
This play of destruction and reconstruction of dimensions—at the very foundation of sculpture—is not gratuitous: it calmly figures Goethe’s famous creative imperative of spiritual rebirth, “Stirb und werde!” (“Die and become!”), the eternal return to life.
Hélène Lamarque
www.galeriehelenelamarque.com
Thierry Farcy: The Work of Nature
The artist has returned from the abyss—the bottomless mirror in which Narcissus gazes upon his perfect face, to the point of death: perfect, yet tragically inhuman.
A face emptied of being has filled with matter. The artist has rediscovered the work of Nature, and today multiplies these human faces without end—each one altered by nature’s contingencies: a bump, an uneven gaze, that comforting flaw which makes a being singular.
Yet the razor-thin line between normal and abnormal, between beautiful and ugly, is quickly crossed—for the face has left behind the ephemeral realm of bone and flesh for a material that is hard and enduring.
Time’s irreversible imprint fixes these beings forever: cast from the same mould, yet so different in their dizzying resemblance, petrified in an expression of life—eyes fixed and empty, and yet “strange and piercing,” like those of an army of buried soldiers the artist might have unearthed from the far shore of life.
Dominique Diard
Senior Lecturer, University of Caen
Thierry Farcy: 46 XY, Narcissus in the Abyss
The face that haunted the artist has returned from formlessness, embodied in a series of generic heads—ageless and expressionless—whose smooth purity and absolute neutrality reduce the human being to an essence: a human clone multiplied without end into an impenetrable multitude.
Confronted with the anguish of humankind created by humankind—of the human copy reproduced in series—the painter became a sculptor, to model this uniform man to the point of vertigo: the being that is not, the artist’s greatest pitfall.
For whether fantasy has become reality or not, science fiction is no longer fiction: it is now possible to clone the human being, to forget the other—the stranger, the one we are not—in favour of an identical man, inauthentic and univocal.
Thierry Farcy offers us his refusal of that man: a man stripped of imagination, whose gods would be dead—Narcissus in the abyss.
Dominique Diard
Senior Lecturer, University of Caen