Since 2014, Jade Fourès-Varnier and Vincent de Hoÿm have been working together as the artist duo Jacent. In their site-specific installations, they merge art and everyday life, creating walk-in environments that explore ideas of community, intimacy, inheritance, and hospitality. With Ranch, they transform Haus Seel into a multi-layered total artwork that draws visitors into a dense, atmospheric cosmos. The title Ranch immediately evokes images of the American West, cowboys, and Marlboro advertisements. Yet Jacent distort these clichés and transpose them into the present and into the local context of Siegen. Rural culture, landscape imagery, and the region’s industrial past intersect, revealing different historical layers that overlap without becoming nostalgic or romanticized.
At the entrance, the work Barrier – consisting of a movable gate and a painting – greets visitors. It references rural labor and animal husbandry while also addressing notions of boundaries and belonging. As the first threshold of the exhibition, it marks the passage from the familiar into Jacent’s distinctive cosmos. On the upper floor, a band of objects and materials unfolds like an open, fragmentary timeline. Fabric remnants, floral motifs, small figurines, and pieces of jewelry evoke biographical moments and scenes from daily life. Some elements appear as quick sketches, others condense into more complex image fields, forming a rhythm of moods and memories.
Large-scale carpets play a special role, structuring the space like abstract fields of color. They refer both to painterly traditions and to landscape representation. Unlike traditional painting, which maintains distance, Jacent translate the principle of abstraction into a physically accessible space.
The paintings on tiles possess a particular immediacy: often created in a single gesture, they resemble sketches or captured thoughts. In some works, one can sense the influence of Jade’s grandmother, the sculptor Agnès Racine, whose small bronze figures are integrated into the installation. In the basement, visitors encounter the local Siegen figures Henner and Frieder. Originally created in 1902 as bronze sculptures for the Düsseldorf Industrial and Trade Exhibition, Jacent reimagine them as large illuminated sculptures. Heroic symbols of industrial labor are transformed into open, ambiguous figures of a plural society. Gender roles remain deliberately undefined; adornment and light lend the figures a celebratory character. Past and future, the local and the global, enter into a vivid dialogue.
Ranch thus opens up a space that intertwines local references and global visual worlds. Symbols and traditions are humorously reinterpreted; notions of labor, community, boundaries, and freedom are reconsidered—always connected with scenes of celebration, gathering, and dreaming.
Their works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including: CAC Brétigny (2024), Sans titre, Paris (2023), Le Shed – Centre d’Art Contemporain de Normandie (2022), sonneundsolche, Düsseldorf (2022), Cocotte, Treignac (2022), Liste Art Fair Basel – Special Guest Programme (2021), Plat-, Amsterdam (2019), PSM, Berlin (2018), In extenso, Clermont-Ferrand (2017), Tonus, Paris (2017), Pogo Bar at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017), Harpe 45, Lausanne (2015), and Lokal-int, Biel (2014). They have also participated in group exhibitions at: Crèvecœur, Paris (2024), Fondation Boghossian – Villa Empain, Brussels (2023), One gee in fog, Geneva (2023), Wallstreet, Freiburg (2023), Pina, Vienna (2022), Campoli Presti, Paris (2022), Sans titre, Paris (2022), Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris (2021), CAN – Centre d’Art Neuchâtel (2020), High Art, Paris (2020), MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (2019), Bozar, Brussels (2018), FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2018), Villa Noailles, Hyères and Toulon (2018–2023), and Künstlerhaus Bremen (2017).
