Guillaume Cochinaire

Guillaume Cochinaire is a contemporary French sculptor born in 1987, hailing from a long line of marble workers in Nancy. Raised in an environment where contact with materials was central, he spent his childhood exploring disused buildings at the Nancy slaughterhouses, the family marble workshop, and old dumps. His early playmates were often homeless, and his adventures included hiding in burial vaults and playing knucklebones with ox femurs. His natural curiosity extended to both the world of materials and nature, with his childhood aspiration to become either a fisherman or a shepherd, as indicated in his school orientation form.

After completing a baccalaureate with a visual arts option, Guillaume initially hesitated to follow his peers into the Beaux-Arts path. However, at the age of 20, he decided to pursue his artistic passion and passed the Nancy Fine Arts competition with a set of works exploring the unconventional theme of "placental reminiscences." His next five years were marked by a creative explosion, during which he embraced a jack-of-all-trades approach to art. He delved into photographic techniques, the history of cinematography, and eventually found his way into stop motion animation cinema, focusing on frame-by-frame manipulation of objects in volume.

Guillaume’s thesis in his second year, titled "Mise-en-abîme in stop motion animation cinema in Eastern Europe," took him to the library of the International Institute of Puppetry in Charleville-Mézières, and even to Prague, where he sought out art masters. His Erasmus year was spent in Ostrava, a former industrial city in the Czech Republic that deeply influenced his work with its apocalyptic atmosphere. By the end of his studies, Guillaume's artistic focus had shifted toward sculpture and installation, culminating in his fifth-year dissertation on "Acheiropoietic Images" (images not made by the hand of man), which earned him the National Diploma of Plastic Studies in 2012 with the jury’s congratulations.

Since completing his studies, Guillaume has participated in several Land Art events and exhibited his works in France, Belgium, and Germany, continuing to explore the intersection of sculpture, installation, and the environment.