Cyril Carret talks about his work on CELLULE (Cells) :

At the origin of this plastic and photographic work, there is my admiration for the obstinate accuracy of the weaver birds which always make their nests according to the same ancestral pattern at random materials met in the nature. Originally there is an outcome of a psychoanalytical research to undo the determinism of my history. And my passion for still lives and twilights of the Italian painter Caravaggio.

Cells (masks) are put on the naked body of the models. Made -by myself- from cables bones or halyards gleaned in the course of my meetings and feelings, this exoskeletons contrasts with the loosened bodies showed with no subtleties nor eroticism. What obstacle are they the expression of ? What prisons, which cages are engraved in those hurt and rangy bodies lost in this neutral environment made of concrete ? They are what escapes us and resists us, what blocks us : the repressed desire, the desire which does not say its name, what we do not manage to build or to solve. In the snares weaved by the mask, the story of our neuroses is trapped with our confinements and our inheritances.

Metaphoric Cells and vulnerable bodies: exorcisms.

Anne-Sophie Rousset, professor of philosophy, talks about Cyril Carret’s work :
Cyril Carret's work develops patiently, silently, a singular universe. The photography is here the ultimate stage of seizure of a long and meticulous work of plastic creation which takes its roots in the relationship with the material. The raw material, the trivial material, even the waste sometimes is got back, accumulated then ordered by the artist who appears to sculpt transcend it in subtle and bright compositions. Through this precise, stubborn shaping happens an order, aesthetic then photographic, which transforms it radically, and which shows the metamorphosis. The work then adorned to reveal, in its forms and its puzzling compositions, what the world can have of profoundly dreamlike. The photography stops our look, and calls it to the pondering, thanks to a set of contrasts which destabilises it: between the triviality of the materials and the beauty of the composition; between the extreme visual precision and the produced shady emotion; between its photographic nature and its obvious links to sculpture or paintings. Whenever it’s about portraits, still lives or puzzling plastic layouts, every photography works the paradox to disturb, attract, deepen our vision. It is a game with the somber and the bright, the trash and the sublime, the harmless and the mysterious. The image destabilises our sight, renews it, densifies and opens it. The series “Cells" offers for us the portrait of naked bodies with faces embedded in masks which enclose them. These masks patiently made, like somber jewels, lock entirely the faces that become invisible, forced, imprisoned. Whereas bodies show themselves as they stand in their nudity, the individuality disappears behind the mask. And we feel its subjection as well as its desire of emancipation, probably painful. The series shows bodies without make-up in a motionless and fixed movement and faces adorned but totally locked. The artist builds portraits which show the dissonance between our quest for freedom and all which imprisons us, between our desire of others and our solitude. The image, skilfully elaborated, shows then the tension which crosses our human condition. And the art piece, again, pushes us in this demanding universe to show through its beauty as well our confinement as our difficult quest of ourselves.