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Lancelin describes his inflatable sculpture, Pyramid XL Sphere, as a monumental work dedicated to contemplation and exploration. As if emerging from ancient history, the art installation’s stacked, yellow-colored spheres (a nod to the shade of Pittsburgh’s three iconic golden-colored ‘sister’ bridges that span the Allegheny River) create the geometric pyramid shape. Pyramid XL Sphere soars through infinite space and brings us into an intimate artistic experience and journey in the Metaverse between real and artificial.

Lancelin also compares his hometown of Lyon, France to Pittsburgh, as each city shares a rare characteristic of nature with the meeting and crossing of several rivers (Rhône River and Saône River in Lyon, France; and the Ohio River, Allegheny River and Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, PA).

Mr. Lancelin’s sculptures have also been presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust in past, during the EQT Children’s Theater Festival in May 2019. Lancelin’s interactive, immersive art installation, circle circle circle, a 15 foot-high maze of interconnected, colorful oversized rings, made its world premiere during that festival.

For more information about Cyril Lancelin, visit townandconcrete.com

About the Artist

Cyril Lancelin is a French visual artist, born 1975 in Lyon, France. He is a graduate of École Nationale Supérieure ‘Architecture (ENSAL), Lyon.

He began his career working for architects and artists in Paris and Los Angeles, using 3D modeling techniques and virtual images that he developed in the 1990s. Lancelin shares, “Behind the scenes of each drawing project, the artist is emerging.”

Lancelin develops a hybrid work made up of sculptures, immersive installations, drawings, virtual experiences, and videos that forge links between the physical and the fictional. It is from a plastic vocabulary based on primitive geometry that he links architecture and the human body; the everyday and the functional; the perennial and the ephemeral; and science and nature.

Past childhood construction games, supported by knowledge of space and rhythm, came together in 2015 as the ‘architect revealed the artist’ with a virtual debut of projects in the Metaverse: imaginary houses, artistic installations. In 2017, his virtual work KNOT sprang from the screen with its bright pink glow and came to life as an immense, light-filtering, inflatable structure in Hangzhou, China.

Lancelin’s creations take on architectural connoted names in homage to the source of his art. The artist’s works are designed from simple forms based on the model of repetition as spheres, cylinders, cubes, pyramids, and geometric shapes XXL, and made from various mediums- stainless steel, plexiglass, resin, and inflatable material.

Inside the immersive, geometric sculpture visitors are welcome to experience and discover unknown spaces, being small in the middle of the art, and yet feel totally comfortable in either getting lost or finding their way. The sculptures render light that reveal curves and shiny material that reflects the faces and surroundings while providing a new exploration through the clearances, nooks, and gaps. Lancelin’s architectural art explores the use of unexpected colors through a dreamy and bubbly world in urban or wild places.