Nicolas Deshayes

The sculptures of Nicolas Deshayes are preoccupied with surfaces — where they begin, where they end, and what meaning they might carry. These works are not quite, it should be pointed out, an exercise in the kind of postmodern critique of the commercial world's suppression of depth offered up by, say, Frederic Jameson or Even Better Than the Real Thing (1991) era U2 ('We'll slide down the surface of things…'). There's something determinedly twenty-first century about their business with planes and skins, and though they have one eye on the frictionless aluminium casing of a MacBook Air, and the other on the crisp and craggy potato topping of a gastropub shepherd's pie. These are sculptures about taste, and authenticity, and how these things wind around the form and content of public life. They are also about a kind of excess materiality, about the consequences of soliciting consumer and other desires.

Tom Morton in the catalogue for The Shape We're In.