When I first discovered the atelier of Stéphane Marcault, his work was on the floor, composed of a multitude of parallelograms made of piles of superposed wrapping papers for citrus fruits.I thought, at first,that this was one of those critiques of minimalism that by borrowing its geometric forms, undermined their economy and formal purety by using perishable materials or permitting everyone to carry away a part of it, to consume it, thereby destroying the order and rigor of the design.
In a word, a work that  offers an ironic response to excessive formalism, by a simple gesture, whose vigor annuls a project judged to be too essentialist or puritan..
It was only later that I understood that I had seen a preliminary work and that if there was, in the choice of these papers, a fascination for the life, intensity, radiance, the simplicity of the material, it was not to be used in opposition to other propositions but to be incorporated in the work yet to be constructed, giving it its raison d'être.
What was, at first  sight, merely a collectable object, rose above the status of collected element to become the body of a new proposition: to transform a collection into a creation.
Above all, the primary material speaks of desire: visual desire, the desire to take, hunger, thirst, here and there words-"you and I","deliciosa", "amore", the solar  beauty of the round form, the plastic beauty of an everyday scene, or how, for a creator, simply to let speak the anonymous beauty of these colors and graphic forms.
Stéphane Marcault's response, in the manner of pop artist or as an heir to the century's major aesthetic movement- the collage-is to appropriate as a first step in the composition of his work. He is animated by an acute attention to popular culture, the "ordinary" nature of images anyone could see at a marketplace, to the exhibition of street full of these papers, passing from hand to hand, and that have provoked exchanges, looks, caresses.
Stéphane Marcault's asserts his choice: the use of this fragility, normally destined to loss and oblivion, but here on the contrary, because he puts his finger on it, becomes the principal force of what he create. Protecting, not by conservation but by displacement, developping a new use and thereby changing our way of seeing, which suddenly gains an original vocabulary, a new frontier of emotions and experimentation.
But what experience exactly ?
What does Stéphane Marcault do with this radiant beauty, this tactility at our fingertips, the fantasy of desire and fragility
Like a painter, the papers become his vocabulary and his colors and he applies them to the world, to the objects surrounding us, changing them as he proceeds.
He projects them on to bodies, imagining costumes, dresses,second skins. But here the plot thickens, the work becomes insidious, more troubling-can we use these objects and are there bodies for his clothes?
Is the question whether a possible function exist, or on the contrary are we being invited to witness an elegy for the past, or only dreamt of,or perhaps of a utopia for beings yet to be invented.

Olivier Kaeppelin
Art critic- writter, France- Culture programs director.