"Extraits"

Born in 1961 in Antibes in southern France, Sylvestre Anasse is a self taught in photography.

Having grown up in the family workshop among the ceramics of his mother and the sculptures of his father, works the earth and draws since childhood. Little inclined to studies, he forces himself to attend school, not as a student but as a simple visitor.

After devoting his schooling to comic books and customised pushbikes, he joins the Freinet school in Vence, where he develops a taste for printing and trout fishing. It is at this time that he
puts together the plans for different structures for kindergarten and utilitarian sculptures.

As a teenager, he integrates the Anasse workshop, opting to work on the potter’s wheel, and thus becomes part of the production process. Alternating between the mediums, he multiplies
the experiences in engaging in iron sculpture, tapestry and the occasional stone cutting, laying out the plans for his “future houses”. Besides this, he works on major modelling projects, dishes for the most part, whose original use is eroded over time to transform itself into tableaux; mainly landscapes, bestiaries and the female form.

The majority of the first photographs were made using rudimentary or deficient devices: some of the films from this period were processed 25 years later. For the last ten years and up to this day, the intention is to work with different tools, but the concept remains the same as it was for the first experiments: cut-outs, negative overlays, addition of of inks, paints and materials, more or less enigmatic symbols or signs. It’s a confrontation of objects or disparate elements that follow one another in small groups in a coherent way.

In his universe, there are no specific themes, at least other than what happens to be close at hand, from heteroclite objects and their proximity ...