Anywhere but Here

Anywhere but Here, Segard’s first solo at Experimenter, gathered a decade’s movement between Delhi and Marseille: large charcoals on linen and paper — Blindspot, the twelve-sheet suite Divide, Construct, Deconstruct, the Disparate drawings — alongside built structures in wood, cement and metal (Under the Skin I and II) that carried the drawings’ architecture off the wall and into the room. The works on paper fix the undersides of flyovers and the dark horizons of the megacity; the structures answer them at body scale, precarious and propped.

Segard’s drawings and paintings are characterised by deep, forceful mark-making with charcoal, where forms appear like the underbellies of brutal flyovers, and distant horizons occupy the field of vision with dark, growing columns that threaten to block out the light, suggesting an ominous vision of the world. Juxtaposed alongside are sculptural installations that seem to rupture this dark vision. Coming together as an amalgamation of the natural and the manmade, the disparate and definitive lines between the two seem to blur in the installations. Painted tree trunks intrude into assemblages using metal structures, concrete casts and wooden supports that hold themselves together in precarious balance. Segard’s practice finds its conceptual underpinnings in the Italian “Arte Povera” movement of the ’60s. He uses found items from the city to build his sculptures — malleable scrap metal, cloth, wood, paper, canvas, nails — scavenged objects that are repurposed to create a narrative that furthers his intuitive interpretation of cities that are appropriating constantly.

Anywhere but Here reads like an ode that may very well stem from Charles Baudelaire’s poem Elevation, a possible starting point of his peripatetic pursuit. The direction of Segard’s enquiry feels urgent and, in contemplating notions of contemporaneity, seeks to address his own locus within the environment that he finds himself surrounded by.

Parni Ray’s essay on the exhibition is at Anywhere but Here.