Guy Kayser, known as Guykayser, was born on February 26, 1954 in Paris, to a communist politician father and a social worker mother.
Resistant to the school system and opposed to military service, he travelled through Latin America from an early age. Back in France, a surprising experience revealed his calling: he would be an artist.
Declared unfit and discharged, he took life-drawing classes at Place des Vosges, followed by two years at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, then, in 1980, he set up his studio in a squat of international artists (American, Serbian, Argentinian…) in Gentilly. Year after year, this place would become a laboratory for new ideas.
1983: he takes part in the Vitry salon. The FDAC of Val-de-Marne buys a piece from him (MacVal collection).
Guykayser begins making polychrome objects and starts working with Gérard Paresys, an engineer at the CNRS. Together, they create their first digital and sound sculptures. Their collaboration has continued ever since.
Spiritual tinkering
From 1988, he exhibited at Galerie Jean-Claude Riedel, Rue Guénégaud in Paris.
- 1988: Various and contemporary mental objects.
- 1989: Spiritual tinkering.
- 1990: Minimental art.
Meeting art critic Jacques Leenhardt would be important. In 1991, he collaborated with Wolinski on Denisot’s show “Nulle part ailleurs”: he supervised the graphic palette. This also marked the beginning of an artistic digital production.
Ladders
It all began the day the artist inherited a pair of wooden ladders from his grandfather. While clearing out the latter’s studio, he stored them with the wood he uses as raw material for his creations. The object, initially seen as simple salvaged material, nevertheless marked a turning point in his career. For ten years, the artist would collect other ladders, twisting them, taking them apart and assembling them into sculptures. A singular object, a simple wooden ladder, whose discovery is linked to the death of an elder, thus became a guiding thread in his creation. The ladder refers him to what he is: a tinkerer and a go-between who works matter with his tools, breaks down reality to extract meaning and offer it back as a mirror to society. (Véronique Dassié)
- 1994: Galerie Julio Gonzales, Arcueil
- 1995: Grand Prix de Montrouge
- 1997: Galerie Boulakia, Paris
Collective self-portraits
In 1998, the squat where he worked was demolished as part of a real-estate development. Guykayser and his family moved to the Loiret, where he set up his new studios.
This was an important moment in his work; this distance led him to break with the gallery world and he shifted toward digital creation, focusing on collecting speech, listening and human interactions, which became the material with which he now designs his installations: the “Collective Self-Portraits”.
- 2000: The tractor takes flight – Participation in the “32 + 32” project of Jean Bojko’s “TéATr’éPROUVèTe”
- 2001: The Nevers shelf
- 2002: Conviviales de Nannay
- 2004: I give you my word – La Chambre Blanche – Quebec
- 2004: Xenia and Marcel – My mother’s 80th birthday – “TéATr’éPROUVèTe” – Corbigny
- 2004: From Loire to Seine – Briare and Loing canals
- 2006: The Tree of Voices – Montargis urban area and the banks of the Loing
- 2007: The Washhouse – Gentilly
- 2008/2010: You benefit from being known – Montargis
- 2010/2011: The Passengers – Cité du Refuge – Salvation Army – Paris 13th
- 2011: Otto’s tour – The cultural food tour – “TéATr’éPROUVèTe”, Corbigny
- 2015: The seats of art – Galerie Agart
- 2017: The civil registry shelf – Online
- 2019: Too close to the Loing – Les Tanneries contemporary art center
Photography and its digital processing
From 2001, alongside these works, Guykayser developed several photographic series based on the same principle: an everyday object photographed in all its possible forms, followed by a manual or generative digital transformation.
- 2001 – Landscapes
- 2002 – Flowers
- 2004 – Locks
- 2008 – Bordus
- 2012 – Balloons
- 2015 – Banettes
- 2020 – Hoops
- 2022 – Rings
Generative image processing is done with a dedicated program that indexes and disrupts the image’s pixels according to variations in a data curve (water level, mortality, etc.).
Bordus, a world apart
2008 – Peter Briggs / Guykayser (the bordus) – Galerie Agart – Amilly
“We’re always on the edge of something.”
The bordus are a set of photographs of details from the “edge of” the Briare canal which, assembled into a diptych visualized by a computer program, recreates a photograph that is both single and multiple;
“A bordu is probably a little more than an edge and a little less than a border. If the border is what lies at the edge and extends alongside it, the bordu would be what becomes embedded right there. By force of circumstance, it would also be the boundary or the fold where the photo is articulated, like a mirror (” Bernard Chambaz).
Conversational objects and/or conversational device
Christophe B-E., who knows my work well, said one day to Guykayser:
“– I’m going to introduce you to someone who works on language… Like you!
To which the artist replied:
“– I work on language?”
That’s how the meeting with Olivier Baude came about, a linguistics researcher at the CNRS. A specialist in processing and exploiting spoken corpora, in all their dimensions: emancipated speech, exclusive language, free conversation, the study of language through sound portraits… What Guykayser was already doing (without knowing it) in his “Collective Self-Portraits “.
This collaboration gave rise to conversational objects and devices. These objects, developed in collaboration with Gérard Parésys, include a database and a technological platform (CoCoON) managing linguistic data remotely, an interactive interface for listening to and navigating the database, and a system for capturing conversational practices.
It is within this scientific framework that Guykayser creates his object-sculptures that generate a disruption with the scientific object of audio collection, offering an artistic shift that allows a fluid conversation to emerge.
- 2012: Memory holes
- 2015: Landscapes of the larynx
- 2015: Voices from the sandbox
- 2018: The conversational capsule
- 2019: The conversational kiosk
- 2021: Off-center conversations
- 2021: A & B – Ferdinand de Saussure and his drawings
- 2022: Listening / Speaking (associate artist)
- 2023/2024: Waves, the totem and the floats of the Ourcq
