Interview by Jimon

1-Baptiste Tavernier, one word to describe him?  Maze.  Since my childhood I have a passion for labyrinths and mazes. Although this passion started with kid games and then continued on as a hobby, I decided to explore it as an Art form at the beginning of the 2010. All my artworks feature mazes or labyrinths. In the meantime I also do a lot of researches and studies on that topic: history / mythology, philosophy, geometry, design. Moreover, I tend to lead my life as in a maze, somehow. I cannot stop exploring new corridors, opening new doorways. But no worries, I retreat right away if I smell a “dead end”, and I try to keep in mind the correct path to follow.

2-Where were you born and where do you currently reside?  I was born in Vaison-la-Romaine, in the south of France. This is a small but quite fascinating city: it has a very vast Roman ruins excavation site with an amphitheater and numerous Roman artifacts. There is also a medieval town up the hill, with a cathedral and a castle; and there is of course the modern town.  However since 2006, I have been living in Japan.

3-Your first experience with art as a child:  Graphic arts, pretty bad! I hated it! I couldn’t find the way to properly depict what I wanted. I guess I was too young. Couldn’t do abstractions like perspectives, volumes, etc. I think that is why I spend most of the time drawing mazes. Some time they would span an entire sketch-book of 50 pages. Once finished, I would give them to some of my classmates and they would try to solve them. I used to add “complications” like monsters or dragons, so you would need to roll a dice if you bump into them, in order to pass through. When I think of it, my stuff was close somehow to CYOA books, board games or role games. Some kind of Dungeon & Dragon & Maze! In a more simplistic fashion of course. I should have pursued that! I would probably be richer now.  On the other hand, at that time I was spending many hours a week studying music. I used to play saxophones, drums, and later steelpan. So that artistic side was blooming while drawing or painting were withering.

4-The future is _________.  A dual complex network of paths. Most of us nowadays must manage two lives at the same time, the “hardware” life and the digital one.

5-What is your thought on the following statement; Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable!  Something to meditate about, certainly. Art needs to trigger things, may they be emotions, indignations or revolutions. If you do art just for the sake of spreading then selling colours, with no deep rooted project, then you are wasting other people’s time. The sentence I hate the most is “Art is a universal language! Blah blah blah”. No it is not an universal language! It might be a universal endeavour, but the cultural background needed to understand art and the emotions it triggers vary greatly from a culture to another and an era to another. If art was an universal language, it would just comfort the comfortable.

6-You do intricate body painting, this seems time consuming. What is the longest you have spent body painting?  Not so long actually, maybe an hour or two. That is because I do not apply the same degree of precision and complexity in body painting and canvas painting. On the canvas I often create my mazes using rulers and compasses, tracing thin lines. This can take months. On a model however, there are limitations. You cannot keep working on a women for 8 hours before shooting. You cannot use compasses of course (ouch!) and rulers don’t work since the body has curves everywhere. I thus have to draw the maze freehand; it does not look as good (in a labyrinthine way of thinking) or intricate as on the canvas, but it is faster to unfold.

7-You have a million dollars to spend on art, you buy.  Ishida Tetsuya. Probably the only modern artist who has painted the “real” Japan. I love his works. He died very young but painted more than a hundred of large size works. They are very dark and urban, and at the same time you can find some nostalgia in them. Most probably the painter’s nostalgia for a better world, far from Japan.

8-Least favorite part of your day:  Flossing

9-Did you have any training for art or is it inherent?  I studied art but it was mainly in music. I also studied Japanese traditional aesthetics like Ikebana, scroll making, lacquering. I never went to the Beaux Arts or other schools in France.

10-Do you remember the first piece of art that you created?  Yes. It is not that long ago. A friend of mine who lives in Miami and used to be involved in Art Basel at its beginning, saw a small maze I was drawing; I don’t remember why I did it, maybe for a kid.  He asked me what was that stuff I was drawing, so I explained him about the maze stuff. He asked then if I had ever considered to make mazes as artworks, to which I replied “no”.  At that time I was working in a small shop doing lacquering, leather and lacing works. So I just borrowed some lacquer and brushes and tried to do an “artistic version” of my mazes. I showed it a couple of years later to my friend in Miami. I think he was genuinely impressed. And here we are.

11-How would you like to be seen as an artist years from now?  I honestly don’t know. I tend to focus on present, and learn from the past. That’s an important tenet of Japanese martial arts. The future, who knows what’s happening tomorrow ? These days, planning more than a few hours ahead seems a waste of time.

12-Do you have a place/person/thing that you visit for inspiration?  Not for inspiration. I do have places where I go to “refresh” my mind. The French Alpes: I used to be quite competitive in skiing and snowboarding, so I need my two weeks of powder every year otherwise I loose my mind. There is also my hometown, since there are a lot of cultural activities there, and good wine around.

13-If you could have dinner with 3 artists living/dead who would be at your table?  Ishida Tetsuya, as mentioned before. Da Vinci, to talk about his studies on geometry. Yamaoka Tesshu since he was both a master of the brush and a master of the sword… Would have plenty of stuff to talk with those guys, and amusingly I think they would have fun talking to each other.  Well, since we have two Japanese and one Westerner at that table, let’s make it even and bring a fourth chair for HR Giger! That should make a fun crew to listen to.

14-Name three things you can’t live without in your studio?  Well, it is Japan my friend! I don’t have a studio! We live in small spaces here.  I paint in the living room when we don’t eat, in the kitchen when we don’t cook, in the bedroom the rest of the time.

15-How would someone find you on the social media?

Instagram: @baptiste_tavernier

www.facebook.com/tavernierbaptiste