Nicolas Deshayes
Talk Art
Russell Tovey and Robert Diament c/o Independent Talent
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2026
⏱️ 66 minutes
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Summary
Talk Art Season 27 continues with sculptor Nicolas Deshayes whose works explore the form and materiality of bodies and what happens below their surfaces. Hosted by Robert Diament.
Process, or processing, is the impetus for Deshayes’ sculptures, which manage to convey states of liquid, hardness, hot, cold, and mechanically produced objects and systems. Vital processes of ingestion, and circulation, are evoked by elegantly utilitarian forms. Deshayes’ surfaces are consistently impermeable – recalling the architecture of public amenities.
Using predominantly casting methods with bronze, iron, or earthenware, Deshayes tends to seek out artisans and factories who specialise in techniques of production; their historical lineages and geographical particularities converging within his conceptualisation of the work as it develops.
Extreme heat is used in these casting processes commonly and the materials rely on changes in temperature in order to come alive. But molten metal rapidly hardens into a solid form, its movement as if suspended in time. Deshayes has recently rendered some of these sculptures functional again, plumbing hot water around a room, or pumping water into public ponds.
In his 2016 installation Thames Water, he recast the gallery as an organism by installing a series of interconnected radiators, in doing so concretising an analogy of the body and its systems to the plumbed and networked city. It is in these works that we are reminded of how their organic forms are not only reminiscent of the bodies of humans, but also of domestic, civic and biological circulatory systems.
Nicolas Deshayes was born in Nancy, France, in 1983, and lives and works in Dover.
Follow: @NicolasDeshayes
Pillow Talk, a joint exhibition with Nicolas Deshayes & Paloma Proudfoot, runs at @QuenchGallery in Margate until 22nd March 2026.
Thanks to Stuart Shave Modern Art. Learn more: https://www.modernart.net/en/artists/nicolas-deshayes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. I am Robert |
| 0:07.5 | Diamant and you're listening to Talk Art. Welcome to Talk Art. Today we are in Margate. We're at my house and |
| 0:15.5 | I am feeling like an extraordinary machine and that is a quote from Fiona Apple. And I was listening to |
| 0:23.7 | her music recently and I saw a real parallel between the metaphor of her song and the work of |
| 0:29.3 | today's guest, which is predominantly sculpture. And I would describe him as an artist, artist in many |
| 0:35.8 | ways, because I think the life of a sculptor is |
| 0:38.9 | often, I just think it's harder in many ways compared to painting or drawing or different kind |
| 0:44.9 | of mediums, especially within the market. And I think also the kind of cost and the kind of skill |
| 0:50.3 | level you need and the dedication you have to have to kind of get things made if you're |
| 0:55.5 | collaborating with factories or different collaborators to get your ideas realized. |
| 1:02.1 | And one of the reasons I wanted to have today's artist on the show is because we have had |
| 1:07.2 | quite a parallel kind of experience and life over the past, I would say, like 15, 16 years. |
| 1:14.9 | And when I started working with Carl Friedman in Shoreditch, I very quickly was hanging out with today's |
| 1:21.2 | guest. And it was a really interesting time in London because there were all these younger galleries |
| 1:26.2 | that were kind of opening as a kind of |
| 1:28.2 | follow on from icons like Maureen Paley in Bethnal Green. But there were lots of younger galleries |
| 1:33.6 | like Kate McGarry and Stuart Shave and at the time Jonathan Viner and Carl Friedman, who had all kind |
| 1:38.4 | of moved to Shortwich or those kind of areas of East London. So slightly more central in a way. |
| 1:44.1 | And also people like Jonathan |
| 1:45.5 | Anderson had his first ever store for J.W. Anderson in about 2015-16, also in Shortwich. And I remember |
| 1:52.1 | we all kind of grew together and it was a really innocent time in many ways. And today's guest |
| 1:57.1 | work always really spoke to me. And there was something about the body, even though |
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