Since the 1990s, Delphine Coindet has been developing a sculptural language through collages and assemblages of widely varying materials and techniques, as well as arrangements of the exhibition itself, treating the display space as an open mise en scène. The inventiveness of her style, which generates an endless dialog with architecture and design, is articulated today around a broad palette of experimental works that includes the art exhibition itself of course, as well as theater design, performance, publically commissioned art, and the creation of radical furniture.

Le Crédac continues its long-term collaboration with Delphine Coindet, which goes back over a decade. This most recent project is part of an unusual work arrangement in association with CIRVA (the International Center for Research in Glass and the Plastic Arts, Marseille). In 2014 the two institutions, moved by a common desire, invited the artist to work with experienced artisanal glassblowers in a material that was entirely new to her practice, glass. The artist has come up with forms that take advantage of both the virtuosity of the craftsmen’s technical expertise and chance, the accidental, leaving room for the creation of a series of variations in terms of color and texture.

The title of the show, Modes & Usages de l’art (Modes and Uses of Art), may come as a surprise with its didactic character in the style of a user’s manual or an old-fashioned magazine. But questions concerning the function of art and its modes of production and representation lie at the heart of this exhibition project. The works presented at Crédac suggest useful objects that have been shorn of their utilitarian function and now display, for the visitor’s appreciation, their purely plastic power and symbolic weight. Playing on the vacillating ambiguity between art and design, the artist questions the heritage of domestic conventions that orchestrate the interiors of our living spaces. Transitional, narcissistic, ritual, what indeed are our connections with the objects around us?