Playing With the Elusive: Revisiting Le Hautbois de Delphes with Alexandre Capan
- Jun 8
- 3 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Artist Alexandre Capan explores the "thresholds of the visible, the zones of silence" between appearance and disappearance. With his artistic approach embracing duration and slowness, he seeks an "unstable" and suspended equilibrium, a tension between what one sees and what one cannot grasp. Our team recently had the pleasure of meeting with him to discuss his work; discover the man behind the visual vibrations that bring texture and depth to the artwork-book Le Hautbois de Delphes.
The search for one's way
Alexandre Capan has always created. Having grown up in an artistic environment, surrounded by musicians, actors, and painters, he doodled in the margins of his school notebooks, painted a few canvases, and even exhibited his work in Nice and elsewhere. He completed studies in history and began a career in real estate, but decided, almost overnight, to dedicate himself to what truly mattered to him: artistic creation and exploration. He embarked on a master's degree in cultural mediation and engineering, and completed an internship in exhibition management at the Villa Arson. For the next three years, he worked on exhibition design while developing his personal practice to find its unique form and voice.
From figuration to abstraction
“In the beginning, my work was very figurative—I would even say too figurative. I had a very hard time going into abstraction…” It is thanks to the use of photography that he begins to probe more vague areas: for example, he photographs his paintings, to then paint close-ups of photos representing his own paintings. By multiplying the steps before the final work culminates in a sort of troubled self-referential mise en abyme, he invites doubt and uncertainty into his work, allowing it to slide towards the unknown. Today, he continues his exploration of abstraction to try and define the edges of his personal visual language.
Creation through play
In fact, it feels as if Alexandre Capan is constantly playing. He blends techniques to create his own methods, combining photography, painting, drawing, performance, and musical composition. When asked, for example, about the basis of his musical practice, he explains that, struggling to work in silence and finding that the music he enjoys sometimes disrupts his concentration, he decided to create sound pieces for his own listening. He can thus work to the sound of his drone compositions or other pieces, such as when he appropriates one of the movements of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, stretching it over two hours to create a piece evoking a certain uncanniness. He might then have fun "translating" his pictorial works into musical compositions, or integrating the latter into his performances. In everything he does, he seems to send signals, to leave traces, in an attempt to express the doubt, the unknown, the elusive.
An ode to music
In Le Hautbois de Delphes, a book tht evokes and celebrates music, Alexandre Capan synthesizes his various artistic practices and brings them together in a kind of visual score that engages in a dialogue with the original and unpublished text composed by Patrick Quillier for the occasion. The book thus presents, on the one hand, Capan's compositions organized into five movements, each adopting a distinct visual language, and, on the other hand, Quillier's text, also presented in five parts, each with a different textual style: prose, poems in verse, prose poems, and so on. The result is an artwork-book where the visuals do not illustrate the text, but where line, form, and colour dance with the words against a shifting landscape, to the sound of the oboe.
The book is presented with a 33 rpm recording made in collaboration with the Cannes National Orchestra. This recording offers a performance of two pieces for oboe and piano in the Belle Époque style, as well as a more meditative work for English horn, performed by musicians Valérie Schaeffer and Vincent Tizon. This listening experience resonates with the poetic and artistic works contained within the book.
The entirety of the work is also crossed by the figure of Vladimir Jankélévitch, a philosopher who devoted much of his time to the mystery of music. His writings on the je-ne-sais-quoi and the presque-rien, points of convergence of the different paths that cross in Le Hautbois, speak to the artist who dedicated two years to the creation of the original works presented in this book. The infinitesmal difference between being and non-being that concerns the philosopher reveals in some way Capan's creative space: at the crossroads of what is manifest, visible, discovered, and what is veiled, murky, unknowable.