Since its inception, the Tarot has inspired and awed countless generations of people. Esoteric, undeniably attractive, stridently magical, these brightly coloured cards of fate and fortune are heavily symbolic and at the same time, as natural and often chillingly straightforward as one could hope for. Hervé Constant has chosen this deck of mystical cards for his latest inspiration which, in fact, follows on from his other passions of the last few years. Constant is a man who has been touched by the power and meaning of symbols and, in particular, the young symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud. A show of work celebrating his life and work went on view to the public at the Musée Arthur Rimbaud, Fran

Le Musée Rimbaud de Charleville-Mézières rend un hommage permanent au jeune poète. La vie et l'œuvre d'Arthur Rimbaud y sont évoquées par de multiples témoignages mais la difficulté d'une telle entreprise est de donner la vie, une âme a cette présentation. L'émotion doit être présente, et c'est en accueillant des artistes et des poètes que le Musée Rimbaud accède a une plus grande authenticité. Hervé Constant a exploré cette voie avec une sensibilité et une intuition poétique qui placent sa peinture a l'écart des courants habituels. Nombreux sont les artistes qui sont séduits par la possibilité d'illustrer l'œuvre du poète, l'écriture de Rimbaud s'y prête, par la richesse des sensations et d

www.artapartofculture.org 1. Tell me something about you and your life as an artist in London. I was born in Casablanca, Morocco. My mother was Moroccan and my father French, but my parents separated when I was 5 and both my brother and I went to live with my father in the South of France, near Toulon where he was born. I do not have an academic background. When I was young, I worked in a shop selling car parts. There I met the director of the students’ parents’ association who advised me to join the Conservatoire de Toulon. I followed his advice and chose to study theatre. Since the courses were held either late afternoon or evening, I could follow most of them. I spent 4 years there and t

Herve Constant’s major preoccupation is communication. This is, of course, another way of saying ‘the modern world’, since it is communication itself, the flow of information, which underpins our contemporary way of life. Constant sees the images which occur in his paintings – a wheel, a tree, a telephone, a chair – as symbols or, at least, as being symbolic in some indefinable way. That is, their possible meaning is somehow radically impenetrable. The inherent problems, the static, system noise, ruptured channels, and so on, which conspire to thwart our efforts at communication, lie at the heart of the diffuse nature of his images’ symbolic intent: the cussed refusal of an object to stand f

July 29 - 10 September, 2010 Nichols Gallery, Broad Center, Pitzer College LOS ANGELES. Pitzer Art Galleries presents an annual installment of a text project bearing the title of Writ Large. The artists involved this year, Marcus Civin, Patrick Hebert, Jane Mi, and Hervé Constant are not supposed to share a common thematic but a common visual feature: the use of language. Written words are used as nude, bare instruments of communication where the observer’s reading interpretation accounts for the sole bank to the meaning flow. In fact, the title of the project itself bears the name of “writ large”, an English idiom that stands for ‘emphasised’ or’ highlighted’. Therefore, the word is the s

P: The first question I want to ask you, Herve, as I stand in the middle of your studio in Hackney, east London, is: where do you come from and why did you move to London? H: I was born in Casablanca, Morocco. I left Morocco when I was about five years old and moved with my father and brother to the south of France. My background is in theatre. I studied in the Conservatoire de Theatre in Toulon, and when I finished my studies in Toulon, I got a grant to go to the Ecole Nationale Superieur des Arts et Techniques du Theatre in Paris. The grant was for two years, and that is when I started acting. At some stage I came with the drama school to London. We visited Stratford, the Shakespeare Theat