In residence at Passages, artists Sarah Holveck and Florent Dégé explore a project between text and drawing, working together in the Centre d’art contemporain’s apartment. Both are interested in drawing, and for Passages they make it the heart of their subject. Their practice confronts, intertwines and experiments.
Sarah Holveck
Sarah Holveck was born in Mulhouse in 1987, and lives and works in Paris. She is a visual artist and co-founder of Pauline Perplexe, an artistic space born in 2014 in Arcueil, a Paris suburb.
On graduating from the Beaux-Arts, she opened an artist-run production and exhibition space, offering the most permissive conditions for working and exhibiting. Pauline Perplexe organizes a dozen exhibitions a year, and her curatorial program is supported by the DRAC Île-de-France. Sarah Holveck has shown the work of many artists of her generation, including Anne Bourse, Simon Bergala, Hendrik Hegray, Rosa Joly and Mathilde Ganansia, as well as paintings by Julien Aubry, one of her eleven-year-old students.
When the context lends itself, she writes about the work of the artists around her, slipping into the bulges of their pockets to better observe their work in motion. She wrote texts for Anne Bourse and Jean-Alain Corre’s exhibition “Softy is as soft as a pillow” at Pauline Perplexe, Sylvie Auvray’s monograph and exhibition Les Cambuses (Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris), Hélène Bertin’s exhibitions Cahin caha at Crac 19 (Montbéliard) and Le Creux de l’enfer (Thiers), and Marie Bette’s exhibition Pneumate at Galerie Mezzanin (Geneva). Like her writing, her artistic practice is nourished by her daily work in the studio, as well as by her work as an art therapist with neuro-atypical people.
Florent Dégé
Florent Dégé was born in 1987. He lives and works in a constellation in Paris.
After graduating in graphic design at the Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, he and Boris Grzeszczak set up the Service Client studio, which from 2014 to 2017 was responsible for the art direction of the magazine l’Officiel 1000 modèles and the creation of signage for official buildings in Champagne Ardenne. This practice led to sporadic collaborations with Morgan Courtois’ Joy project, the communications of the Apparente troupe directed by Daisy Raynal, and the visual identity of Pauline Perplexe. Since 2023, with Hill Adado Sani, they have been designing and renewing signs for African shops and restaurants in the Château Rouge district.
Co-founder of Pauline Perplexe with Sarah Holveck, Kevin Bogey and Morgan Courtois, he is motivated by the need to invent his own rules for exhibiting and working together. In the studio, he works discreetly to invent new forms and techniques. In the kitchen, he reveals his talents by inventing menus for vernissages alongside Antoine Barberon. This research is offered on a turnkey basis to young people in Strasbourg’s suburbs. Between 2019 and 2023, in the company of Éléonore Cheynet, they will make a dozen films in which the young people set about defining their own roles. If he doesn’t always understand all the
