Born in France in 1958.
Nourished by references to history, literature, music and the cinema, the permanent basis of Bernard Calet’s work is built around architecture in the broadest sense and how it influences our lifestyles and actions. Questions relating to space are constantly being explored, whether through games of scale, translation and displacement, or conceptually through the manipulation of words and ideas.
In his sculptures and installations, he makes subtle use of the interplay of light and shadow and reflections as tools of the eye, capable of penetrating space and revealing its volume. With a sharp eye for urban planning, ecology and the organisation of community life, his works ask fundamental questions about how we live today, about the relationship between private and public, between the intimacy of the interior and the unveiling of the exterior.
An adept of interventions in urban spaces, he also produces works in very small formats that are often miniatures of potential worlds on a larger scale. For example, in 2020, during the period of confinement imposed on part of the planet by the covid-19 virus, he created collages in a format barely larger than a postcard, combining different vegetation and architectural elements to create phantasmagorical, illusionistic spaces by superimposing planes and perspectives.
Scale models play an important role in Bernard Calet’s work, reflecting both reality and fiction. The change of scale is one of the artist’s tools for signifying shifts, ambiguities and distortions, phenomena that can occur on a physical level as well as from a philosophical and political point of view on a societal scale. With a sensibility profoundly focused on man and his apprehension of the environment that surrounds him, the presence of the body is induced in most of Bernard Calet’s works, whether as an actor in the device or as a receptor of sensations.