Quentin Gassiat is a young French visual artist who lives and works in Paris. His artistic practice focuses mainly on photography. Xenithia-Nomade Gallery has exhibited two of his recent projects, in Milan and Paris: Zones of Exception (2022) and Sedimentations (2019, 2023).
Zones of Exception is a project that encompasses both fields of photography and of testimony. It aims at confronting ourselves with our relationship towards nuclear disasters through the prism of various places of this history such as Tchernobyl, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. This is an ongoing project and it is to be expanded to other places in the United States and in Russia. The visual experience is structured around three lines which are representative of urban life: symbols, networks and places of exchange. By raising the question of the possibility - or not - of urban life in the aftermath of nuclear tragedies, these photographs and the testimonies of people the life of whom has been shaken by such events aim at grasping its human long term consequences. A selection of these works has been shown in January 2022 in Paris.
Sédimentations is very different from Zones d'Exception. It is, at first glance, an urban walk that uses photography to document the superimposition of writings and images on walls: torn, covered and uncovered posters. This series, which questions the link between visibility and presence as well as the effects of chance, was shown in Milan in 2019 and a second chapter will be presented in November 2023 in Paris.
In addition to his own artistic practice, Quentin Gassiat regularly engages with artists from all backgrounds and working in all media. Diaries of these meetings were published in 2020 and 2021. He has also written a dictionary of the street art (Dico de l'Art Urbain, published by Alternatives, 2023).