"Impact people, without impacting nature."
- Saype
To create these works while respecting the environment in which they are placed, Saype has developed an entirely biodegradable paint made from water, chalk, charcoal and milk protein. As a result, the works fade over time, under the effect of plant regrowth, melting snow, wind or waves sweeping sand. It's a process in which appearance and destruction are linked from the outset, much like Buddhist mandalas, which are painstakingly created over several days and destroyed once finished, underlining the impermanence of all things.
Recognising the impermanence of things also means reflecting on the best way to live our existence and be in the world. Saype's work therefore speaks of freedom and mutual aid, of a search for universal harmony and balance.
His humanist commitment has led him to launch a global project in 2019: to symbolically create the world's largest human chain by repeatedly painting a pattern of intertwined and united hands. Undertaken over several years, this ambitious project entitled "Beyond Walls" began at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and now has 19 stages, from Ouagadougou to Istanbul, via Cape Town, the United Nations headquarters in New York and Venice as part of the 2022 Biennale.
The question of remnants, of memory, of how to share this experience, is logically at the heart of Saype's reflections on what 'makes a work' beyond his ephemeral interventions.
The first response to the need to document the ephemeral installation once it had disappeared, faded and melted into the landscape was to use photography, bringing the work into conversation with it some of the accessories used in its creation (stakes, working sketches, etc.). These 'remains', as the artist likes to call them, are then framed alongside photographs of the ephemeral installations in which they were involved.
The artist is also planning to place beacons on the sites where his works have appeared, only to disappear a few days or weeks later. The use of digital technology and augmented reality would make it possible to access photographs and videos of the ephemeral works while on site.
More recently, Saype has decided to work on the notion of scale, playing on the macro/micro contrast that characterises his installations to the point of blurring our perception of them. By placing squares of paper on the ground prior to painting the area, he creates a sort of pixel of the ephemeral work, which can then be removed and given a life of their own. This technique allows him to introduce into the work the physicality of the fresco, the traces of grass and sand, the humidity or salinity of the air, the unpredictability of the wind, the roughness of the ground... All these elements bear witness to the conditions in which the work was made, giving substance to what it means to create 'with' nature and capturing the physical interaction between the artist and nature during his interventions.
Born in Belfort in 1989, Guillaume Legros is also known by the pseudonym Saype. Following in the footsteps of other Land art artists, Saype has taken up the idea of nomadic art on a global scale, interacting with the monumentality of landscapes to better integrate himself into them. In 2018, his project in support of the SOS Méditerranée association, created in the heart of Geneva, attracted considerable media attention, being seen by 120 million people around the world. In 2019, he was named by Forbes magazine as one of the 30 most influential people under 30 in the field of art and culture.