Gilles Sage

visual artist
born in 1993
lives and works between Bordeaux and Hautes-Pyrénées, France 

Biography

Gilles Sage (born in 1993) is a visual artist who lives and works between Bordeaux and the Hautes-Pyrénées. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, from which he graduated in 2017.
Through his writing, he delicately and playfully examines his relationship with the world and others, often infused with a "light fatalism". He works with autofiction to tell his everyday life, often in fragmentary form, to give substance to the "inframince" (very subtle details) and significance to non-events. He also writes journals that narrate daily life, sometimes real, sometimes fictional. These writings take form in self-publishing and like scripts, come to life during readings or performances.
Gilles Sage employs various media to align a best with his perceptions. His photographs, integrated into graphic design works or prints, document the layering of time and invite contemplation. Through various operations like zooming, miniaturizing, juxtaposing, subtracting, or even distorting, recurring motifs emerge, both on the page and in physical space. These motifs are articulated through elementary forms that the artist favors.
Since 2017, Gilles Sage has intermittently relocated his studio to the Pyrenees for several weeks each year. Subtly, the mountains have influenced his artistic exploration. As an experienced hiker, he extracts sensations and various materials from the mountains that later fuel his work when he is no longer wandering across the mountain. His ceramics deconstruct and then reassemble a digitized mountain landscape that has been altered by glitches. He also practices video, installation, and in situ interventions.
During the summer of 2022, he solo-crossed the Pyrenees from east to west and documented his journey in the form of a series of postcards, compiled into a book-like format titled Postcards from the Edge.