Maël Dupraz Nayak’s work moves between personal memory and collective systems of belief, drawing on a visual vocabulary shaped by Catholic ritual, popular culture, and the objects of everyday life. Born in Fribourg to a Swiss mother and an Indian Catholic father, he grew up immersed in religious imagery yet free from doctrinal constraint. This tension - between nostalgia and distance, symbolism and skepticism - remains central to his practice.

The works presented in A Vice and a Sanctuary distill Dupraz Nayak’s exploration of the poetics of contradiction. By placing contexts and symbols in unexpected dialogue, he merges and unsettles their meanings, prompting viewers to reconsider the frameworks that structure their own lives. In transforming devotional and everyday objects alike, Dupraz Nayak reveals the fragility of the value systems - sacred, cultural, and economic - that shape how we understand belief and meaning.

Saturday Night or Sunday Morning (2025)


This sculpture fuses a crucifix with a disco ball, born from the artist’s realization on a dance floor that clubs and churches share striking similarities: DJs and priests, CDJs and altars, both generating a sense of collective ritual. The glittering object spins, demands attention, and reflects the viewer in its mirrored tiles, flattering our ego all while pointing toward deeper questions of meaning. Here, the sacred and the profane meet, suggesting that both nightlife and religion serve, in different ways, as spaces where people seek transcendence, acceptance and community.

13e Salaire (13th Salary) (2025)


This cyanotype on canvas reimagines the image found on a 1956 Swiss 1000-franc banknote, the highest denomination of its time. The intricate design depicts a young woman dancing with a veiled figure, lilies in hand as symbols of innocence, while an angel covers the eyes of an elderly man whose time has come. In the background, the Grim Reaper walks away carrying a lifeless child - the only figure to meet the viewer’s gaze. By transposing this banknote into cyanotype, Maël Dupraz Nayak underscores the paradox of wealth and mortality: no matter how much one possesses, death remains the great equalizer. The work functions as a contemporary memento mori, reflecting on vanity, skewed life priorities, and the illusions of success.

Is All Vanity? (2025)


Formed by LED votive candles spelling the titular question in the artist’s childhood handwriting, this work draws on a devotional object traditionally found in churches and cemeteries. The flickering sentence is both innocent and urgent, bridging childhood curiosity with adult awareness of societal and artistic systems. As the LED lights dim and expire, temporality and impermanence are built into the work itself. By replacing wax candles with their modern, synthetic counterparts, Dupraz Nayak situates the piece in the present while asking timeless questions about finality and the absurdity of human ambition.

Reminder of an Unpaid Redemption (2023)

In Reminder of an unpaid redemption, Maël Dupraz Nayak explores the tension between faith and the weight of the everyday, evoking feelings of both hope and despair through a single image. The cyanotype on textile captures a crucifix laid upon a stack of unpaid bills, a gesture left by the artist’s mother. This intimate yet unsettling juxtaposition highlights the shifting place of religion in contemporary life - once a source of spiritual salvation, now entangled with the pressures of financial obligation. By framing ‘redemption’ through its theological and economic meanings, Dupraz Nayak reveals how belief and survival intersect in the domestic sphere. The work questions whether there remains space for faith in a world governed by material demands.