Over the last ten years, Maxime Bichon has forged a practice that taps into sculpture, poetry, installation, and performance. He focuses on the site and conditions under which art can manifest, favouring the notion that it can appear in places other than dedicated exhibition spaces. In this spirit, he previously took the sky as a studio, developing research on parachuting and base jumping. In 2015 he co-founded the free, alternative art school The Cheapest University, initiated on the hypothesis that pedagogy itself is a work of art.

Maxime Bichon started working again in a traditional studio five years ago. Recurrent forms that make up his body of work include boxes which conceal or reveal their content, disarmed traps and cages as well as abandoned cocoons. At the Capc, Maxime Bichon expands his interest in containers and metamorphosis to the scale of the museum.

The artist shapes the current gallery architecture like a sculpture, intervening on the lighting and on the walls in several places to reveal and alter the properties of the museum, shifting the exhibition into a secondary state. As he conceived the exhibition, Maxime Bichon was informed by the writing of Scottish-Canadian animator Norman McLaren (1914 – 1987), who described cartoons as “the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between the frames”. Hence The chase is an exhibition that attempts to embrace this very area – this in-between – of the work, that of intuition and metamorphosis.

This exhibition is also the final chapter of a series of exhibitions held over the past three years in Treignac in France, Rome (Italy) and Athens (Greece), in spaces whose common denominator was their domestic qualities. They were respectively titled: La fuite et l’enveloppe (2021), The Magician’s Sleeve (2021) and Hôtel des 3 collèges (2022).

This project was selected and supported by the Fondation des Artistes' patronage commission.

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