Cyril Hatt was born in Rodez, France in 1975. Hatt’s had numerous one-person exhibitions, and been included in various thematic exhibitions, in France and throughout Europe, as well as collaborations with Hermes and Lanvin in Paris, Tokyo, and New York. The artist lives and works near Montpellier, France.

Hatt creates sculptures by stapling together multiple closeup photographs he has taken of everyday objects. The transformation of a 3-dimensional thing into 2-dimensional prints that are then reassembled into a distorted 3-D simulation of the original object is both recognizable and otherworldly. 

Artist’s website link

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I first saw the work of Cyril Hatt in a medical office collection near Albi, France.

It was a pair of Nike sneakers, seemingly hanging by their laces. On closer inspection they turned out to be Nikes made entirely of photographs. Like a photo essay about a humble pair of sneakers, that then replicates them in three dimensions. Despite being quite realistic as a representation of the sneakers, there was something a little wonky and home-made looking about it and that’s what made the objects interesting as art work. 

I immediately thought of Isaac Layman’s entrancing photographs of quotidian objects, done in high resolution digital exactitude. But this was not that. Instead of being exquisitely seamless photographs in two dimensions, these were snapshots of the sneakers, now stapled together to mimic the sculptural form of the original objects. It seemed to me a very nice dissection of high and low technology, more similar to David Hockney’s low tech exploration of photo collages from the early 1980s presaging digital tiling of pixels.

Fully intrigued, I inquired about the artist and made contact with him at his studio near Montpellier. We visited a few weeks later and saw Hatt’s whole range of sculptural objects. Some were small, hand-held objects like cameras, keys, cans of Coke—even a tin can full of sunflowers. Others were flatter objects like record albums, framed photographs and old mirrors. Even these were fully 3-dimensional, sculptural objects—the wooden backsides and gilded frames of the mirrors having been photographed and reconstructed as carefully as the fronts. Others were huge mural sized works depicting destroyed signage from subway billboards, complete with all the tattered and torn off prior advertisements.

We bought one of the overly elegant baroque mirrors as well as the lowly tin can of sunflowers.

Hatt’s painstaking process involves thoroughly photographing the chosen objects. Then printing digitally in snapshot format photos. By carefully cutting, splicing, folding, and stapling, Hatt can rebuild a facsimile of the original subject. The stapling is skillfully done. But it’s not tediously careful and verges on obsessive. He’s more of a bricoleur than a surgeon, but with the confidence of significant experience. Clearly this an artist who has gone through a few million staples thus far in his career. 

Where do these fit in the art world? Well, first, I must admit—not predictably. They are not typical sculptures made of sturdy or rarified materials. They invoke the presence of the subject in an uncanny way that many a sculptor might strive for, but they get there more easily---simply because they are built of photographs of the sculpted object. Neither are they typical photographs as documentation of an object. They’re highly focused where they need to be sharp but they don’t approach the level of precision that another contemporary photographer, like Chris Engman or Edward Burtynsky, feels obliged to take.  

Hatt’s work is a world unto itself but it’s a vocabulary we will all recognize as parts of our own worlds. In this, his first U.S. exhibition, it’s my hope that our audience will find the delight and curiosity that I found in discovering his work.

– Greg Kucera