Galería Tomas March is currently presenting a show of recent work by the Valencia-based French artist, Deva Sand (Strasburg, 1968). Titled “La chambre de ma Grand-Mère”, the exhibition consists of sculptures, painting and installation creating with recycled materials the artist uses to compose a world of sculptural hybridisations in an ironic play of similitude and difference where the familiar and the strange, the here and now, are taken as paradigms of the process characterizing modernism.

Sand’s works are grounded in the essentially hybrid condition of contemporary art, forming part of the expanded field that avows our inheritance, not of an image of the world, but its shattered pieces, the fragments of a universe that has lost its global meaning.

Deva Sand transforms the childish “destructive energy” Bataille spoke of into something that inverts its sign and recomposes things, producing duplicities, fragmentations and tremendously unsettling formal combinations, always turning her eye on the home, its places and objects, with a desire to “show what is not seen”. Objects which are so highly visible, so much at hand that they are ultimately rendered so invisible they don’t register on our radar. That’s why her imaginary returns obsessively to the familiar, to the everyday with the scrutinising gaze of the archaeologist.

Deva Sand highlights contrasts, delves into nooks and crannies, forages in the skips and bins on our streets, looking beyond the hypnotic surface of the ready-made, deobjectivising the objects and creating impossible compositions. In her illuminated furniture and emptied armchairs, Deva Sand throws a spotlight on the fragility of the world, evoking the vital inner drive with singular irony and lightness inspired in arte povera and an aesthetic reminiscent of baroque-minimal.

For Sand the work of art is a coded testimony of affect. Her deconstructed chairs, the book-laden and “shoed” table like a well-read vanitas, the beautiful dresser subtly veiling its mysterious contents, the sectioned chair encrusted in the wall with its shadow mirroring its other half, induce a meditative mood, suggesting portals to other dimensions and inviting us to cross the threshold with our own interpretative passion.