Jocelyn Cottencin is an artist in Rennes, France, whose practice brings together photography, video, installation and graphic arts. His work centers around the transmission and reception of image, sign and symbol. One of his recurring subjects is typography, rendered as large-scale dimensional material, with which he intervenes in public space through performances and installations.

Cottencin often works with dancers. Most recently he created scenic designs for the choreographers Yasmin Rahmani's and Loïc Touzé’s dance program that premiered last month in St. Nazaire (below). Almost graffiti-like in its candor, the letterforms of the backdrop spring from Cottencin’s wealth of practice in making typography speak. (The program will be repeated January 14-15 in Pont Chateau.) Information. His current work in progress, Monument, will be presented in video form at the Musée des Beaux arts de Calais from March 9-November 19, with a live performance in May.

A wall drawing for Rahmani's and Loïc Touzé’s dance program, intuitively mapping mixed references from film, music and dance.

For Nuit Blanche Paris 2012, Cottencin created a message board using LED tubes, a luminescent graphic sculpture that created different letterforms according to a brilliantly simple program of on-off switches. Entitled Echoes (below), it layered a series of messages over the darkness, including Tout est Vrai, and Too Much Reality, invoking Parisians consider their options. The sequencing of messages is hypnotic, as words are gradually revealed, inviting spectators to "read" rather than to merely watch. Vimeo. (Echoes was produced by Nuit Blanche Paris, le Voyage à Nantes, FRAC Bretagne.)

In 2012 he created a project entitled Billboard (below), in which large-scale messages spoke to people walking or jogging through a country meadow. He characterized this project as “an anachronism of an object's urban consumer.” Billboard unfolds its messages over a period of one year with a new message painted every three weeks.

And don’t miss Vocabulario, in which dancers shape messages by arranging clothes they pull out of backpacks into letterforms on the floor.

Studio visit, Jocelyn Cottencin on Behance. Website. Index of works on Documents D’Artistes Bretagne.