CAC Brétigny

“At your service”
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team

Hugo Béhérégaray is a visual artist who likes to create environments “conducive to encounters”. The zany forms and sparkling colors of his cardboard works are very often inspired by the design world. Far removed from the productivist purpose of everyday objects, Hugo’s sculptures encourage play, chatter and idleness. Whether it is lamp, a display stand, a cabin or a costume, his productions are made to be used, enhanced, and sometimes destroyed by visitors.

During the different stages of the life of his works, the artist enjoys involving the public. In the design and presentation stages, he co-creates with people who are in principle non-artists. For the project La Médaille en chocolat (The Chocolate Medallion), he reinvents the rules of team sports with schoolchildren. The goal of the game: produce an artistic performance that mixes physical activity with plastic creativity. Hugo has conceived a series of athletic equipment-sculptures including Headballs: mobile targets worn on the head like a hat. In 2024, in collaboration with designers Diego Faivre and Pierre Castignola, he conceived the Mini-Golf Extravaganza, a golf course where the artists invite visitors to play and chat with them. Always playful, Hugo’s projects are chances to create forums of social interaction. His shared creation process is also conducive to emancipation from hierarchies between professional and amateur artistic practices.

In 2019, at the invitation of the Abbaye de Maubuisson, he set up a large hut in a park: De hut is intended to be enhanced by the drawings of people walking by, and to be used as a space for games and conversations. Hugo’s work is never set in stone when it is presented. His sculptures preserve traces of the visitors who have experimented with them. His works contradict the idea that an exhibited work must be a finished work, to be preserved in the state in which it left the artist’s studio. Hugo shows a real interest in exhibition spaces that are allowed to get damaged, being sites intended for use. In this way, he deconsecrates the status of the work in favor of the public’s direct involvement in the art space they visit.

For the “Bascules” season, the CAC Brétigny has invited Hugo for a co-creation residency. He and a group of teenagers from the Breuillet Oxy'jeunes youth center conceive, make and activate sculptures as spaces for refuge and conviviality, but also for giving concrete form to projects that one could not imagine devising alone. Together, in a series of workshops, they use their time to act upon their everyday life and on their town.

Milène Denécheau

Hugo Béhérégaray (born in 1995) lives and works between France and the Netherlands. He is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy and the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. He makes portable, participatory, alterable sculptures, stemming from the desire to create an encounter. He uses accessible materials like cardboard to give life and volume to designs that bring common space to life. His work has been presented at Galerie Dohyang Lee in Paris (2021), Vienna Design Week (2023), and the Musée de l’Histoire Vivante in Montreuil with the Frac Île-de-France (2023).

This project is part of the “Contrat d'Éducation Artistique et Culturelle” (CTEAC) of Coeur d'Essonne Agglomération with the DRAC Île-de-France and the Academy of Versailles.