The “Les Pas Perdus artistic group”, constituted by French and South African visual artists, is part of the collaborative contemporary art movement. Since 1994, in France and on the African continent, the collective initiates and makes works of art with occasional artists. Occasional artists are people who come to art for the occasion and are party to common ownership with Les Pas Perdus for a certain while. They are considered as such, as co-authors. They are men and women who have a creative and sensitive relationship with their everyday life, ordinary practitioners met during residencies and immersions of the artistic group.
Born in South Africa, originally from Mauritius Island, Guy-André Lagesse is the initiator of this collective. Having grown up in Durban, he steps away from the apartheid regime and settle down in France to study Fine Arts. This path of life made of multiple encounters led him to be involved in making connections between genres, registers and peoples whom the social and economic situations tend to separate.
Together with Jérôme Rigaut, Nicolas Barthélemy and Doung Anwar Jahangeer, they cross and confront voluntarily the variety of the aesthetics, by taste of the contrasts. Heterogeneousness, as principle of overstepping borders, and the consciousness of otherness lead towards the realization of a collaborative art, political, and good humored.
An unreasonable thrust pushes the group to bring together people, materials and objects a priori disjointed. As observes Frédéric Valabrègue, all the materials are assembled, brewed, mixed in a Dionysian way: they mix everything in excess “until marrying Luna Park with Documenta”.
For Les Pas Perdus, in their art process, there is no a priori as for the results: Each encounter with an occasional artist models what happens.
Care and attention brought to each one and to every situation contribute to the sense of the work.
The approach connected with everyday life leans on the dynamics of circumstances, improvisation and relationship, putting forward the ordinary as an inexhaustible poetical potential.
The collective takes sense in the awareness of the specific, the common becomes sensitive in complicity with every individual.
One of the definitions of the word “work” is to “bring into play” … Forms follow.