CAC Brétigny

“The initial recording”
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team

In his work, Louis Chaumier explores objects produced over the past fifty years, marked by capitalism and standardization. He examines the relationship between forms and norms derived from industrial design furniture. Using sculpture as his primary medium, he creates works that take up the codes of ordinary everyday objects.

Archives and their mediums hold a central place in his work. He frequently summons the aesthetic of offices and archiving furniture to create pieces that adapt to different kinds of records. Through this plastic practice, he seeks to renew the imagination associated with documents that are chosen for the preservation of traces. Furniture design of the 1980s is often his point of departure, and he takes inspiration from the catalogues of major suppliers like Knoll, those that illustrate products and show them in a situation. He is also interested in spaces for waiting, storage and transition, those places we cross every day without paying any attention to them. He seeks to create an imprint, an archive of those places. In his installations, the artist seeks to transform those standardized environments by bringing tenderness back into them, by giving attention to their constituent materials, and to how they are made. He invites the users of exhibition spaces to take a fresh look at the banality of those everyday forms.

To this end, he uses industrial materials like wood and metal, which he assembles and shapes to create sensitive pieces. For the CAC Brétigny’s “Bascules” season, Louis continues his reflection on the standardization of objects and spaces, while exploring how these elements interact with the personal and collective experiences of visitors.

From 2024 to 2025, Louis is running a co-creation residency with grade 11 and 12 students who are enrolled in “Versatile Commercial Team Members” classes at Lycée Paul Langevin in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. Louis gets those students to translate and transcribe writings from their economics and accounting courses into musical notes. With the help of a keyboard and a pentatonic scale, they jointly experiment with music composition. These sound creations are then played on speakers that they have built together out of wooden picture rails. Participants are also invited to gather their experiments into an archive, which conveys their everyday use of economic data, as well as society’s ignorance of what the processing of this data entails.

Coraline Perrin

Louis Chaumier (born in 1995) lives and works between Paris and Genillé (Indre-et-Loire). A 2021 graduate of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, he develops work that aims to disrupt the uses of the objects and spaces that surround us, particularly those that reflect a certain history of progress, growth, and its failures. He has exhibited at Mains d’Œuvres in Saint-Ouen (2021), Bétonsalon—Centre for Art and Research in Paris (2021), and L'Onde Théâtre Centre d'Art in Vélizy-Villacoublay (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.