Cyril Hatt and Francis Ponge, the traces of a filiation?

Cyril Hatt has been giving us for two decades a series about everyday life, whether objects or animals: musical instruments (guitar, trumpet…), to very trivial beer cans and ashtrays, through the giraffe, pigeons, the baby elephant. When it comes to consumer products, the work of deconstruction/reconstruction generated by the artist’s photographic prism and the sculptural deformation via stapling are anchored above all in a denunciation of consumerism specific to this counter-culture that it claims.

Born in 1899 in Montpellier, not far from where Hatt now lives and works, Francis Ponge could appear as a precursor to this series. This counter-current and iconoclastic poet owes his success in particular to the collection Le Pis Pris pris des choses (1942). His quest for authentic description undoubtedly recalls the plastic artist’s obsession with reproducing his distorted perception through his objective. Ponge divinised the object after giving it sometimes human features. Hatt pays tribute to innocuous elements to better emphasise how their disposable and interchangeable character endangers our humanity: behind each consumable, there is a consumer and the materialistic dependence ends up changing the balance of power between the two data of the equation. Is it the object that is used by this consumer? Where is the latter consumed by his addiction to have it?

Thus, in the writings of Francis Ponge as in the art of Cyril Hatt, the commitment is declined like a foot-den-nez to the society of their time, between poetry, joke (Cyril Hatt’s camera that itself becomes the object of his work), and humour.

Tony Kunter