Transfiguration

A historic performance, which brought visual artist Olivier de Sagazan to the stage, Transfiguration has already been performed over 350 times. Wearing a suit and tie, he unfolds the story of his unfulfilled desire as a sculptor, to bring his creation to life. In semi-darkness, he begins a ritual in which he immerses himself in clay, letting his hands full of paint dance on his head. This malleable material, wetted and mixed with others (straw, branches...), becomes the source of instinctive extensions and misshapen envelopes, shaped blindly by successive over-modeling and erasure. The result is an interplay of animal and monstrous hybridities, and the total disappearance of the human face, the better to reveal its deepest, most intimate perceptions, the hidden identities that possess it. A living sculpture, Olivier de Sagazan belches and chants at the limit of audibility, kneading his next moult, always on the quest to discover who he is beneath his masks, and who the puppeteer is: " I'm amazed at how people think it's normal to be alive. My whole aim is to capture the very strangeness of being here. For me, disfigurement in art is a means, through the very power of the images that can appear, of accessing this awareness. "

Olivier de Sagazan was born in the Congo in 1959. After studying biology, he taught for two years before taking up painting. The omnipresent idea of questioning organic life led him to sculpture, then to performance art. For the past thirty years, the visual artist has been ploughing a singular furrow in the performing arts. An adept of hybrid performances, he explores monstrosity and formlessness, bestiality and humanity. His unparalleled universe has caught the eye of David Lynch, FKA Twigs and Wim Vandekeybus. His two daughters are also wildly successful: singer-songwriter Zaho de Sagazan and choreographer Leïla Ka. Olivier de Sagazan presented Donkey Mass at the TJP.

" Sculptor-performer of otherworldly figures, Olivier de Sagazan exhumes that which, in the unfulfillment of origins, creates a gap at the very surface of appearances.. "
MovementDominique Vernis, 12/2011

olivierdesagazan.com