Valère Costes

Born in 1974 in Dijon (France), he lives and works there. 

The art of Valère Costes casts a keen, off-kilter eye on nature. The objects and sculptures produced by this artist have the charm of low-tech and the tenderness of living things. His work focuses on reproducing certain natural phenomena with the help of a few electric motors, rattling mechanisms which are like so many ersatz plants and animals. His rough re-creations ring in changes, responding wittily to the affect that each one of us can project onto representations of the natural world. So we may be surprised by the empathy created by a few bits of steel, polymer and synthetic fur, painfully in motion. The artist handles irony tactfully, making it a wild weapon for questioning our relation to the world with remove and accuracy.