Visions Liminaires

– Pigment prints Fine Art, cuts – 2015-2016.

The Visions Liminaires series offers a visual study of the historical echoes phenomena.

Each piece of this series takes the form of a combination of images from a variety of sources, but all depicting key historical moments.
The images consist in circular cutouts of different sizes, superimposed over one another: in the forefront, the cutout in the bigger and paler picture allows smaller and smaller (and darker and darker) pictures to be seen.
Positioned at the bottom of the assemblage, almost illegible, the smallest and darkest picture can be considered as its core, the origin of other events (more easily visible), that would have interacted freely which each other.

Referring to Dante Alighieri’s cosmology in The Divine Comedy, the Visions Liminaires series suggests that the matrix of an historical event should be a relatively innocuous fact which, after having resonated with other elements (possibly anachronistic), would have taken unexpected proportions and orientation.

Dated March 21, 2028, August 23, 2029, November 9, 2033 or February 6, 2051, the L’Emanticipation show the front and the back pages of a newspaper of the same name.<br>The articles of the daily newspaper concern the dereliction, the feeling of being abandoned by God.

It depicts a humanity overtaken by changes that are no longer controllable.

Entirely hand-painted in oil whereas it is supposed to be a daily newspaper with a large circulation, L’Emanticipation presents itself as an anti-readymade.

If, by the production of a sound and the phenomenon of the echo, one can apprehend a space and appreciate a distance, these data remain abstract as long as physically this space has not been crossed, that this distance has not been traveled.

This phenomenon can therefore be perceived as symbolizing the gap between the will to know and its concrete realization.

"L’éclat des lointains" presents itself as the exploded mechanics of the production of echo, of which all elements orbit around each other without ever being able to reach. They interact only through their brilliance, by reflecting on each other. It should be seen as a parallel with space exploration, which, as it progresses, is more and more abstract, that is to say, etymologically "separated", because there is an essential, almost ontological, inadequacy. between human being and those unending vastness.

The balance of the whole is created by a small pearl, which concentrates the impossibility of contact and at the same time the beauty of this impossibility, since it is paradoxically because of its inadequacy with its environment that it has been covered with nacre and has reached its perfection.

La toile, c’est le rapport à la trame (de l’Histoire), qui suggère une succession de strates. C’est également le support autorisant la mobilité de la peinture, à mi-chemin entre les fresques, qui restaient à demeure, et les tapisseries, qui furent les premières œuvres picturales itinérantes. 

Certains tableaux sont la superposition de plusieurs œuvres dont nous ne pouvions admirer, jusqu’à récemment, que la couche picturale la plus récente, la ou les couche(s) antérieure(s) ayant été recouverte(s). Ceux-là abritent donc des images fantôme, invisibles mais bien présentes. Les nouvelles technologies permettent paradoxalement de dévoiler ces couches antérieures, et autorisent la cohabitation entre différentes temporalités. 

Les Forêts proposent une réflexion sur l’évolution des œuvres d’art dans le temps, dans leur forme et leur réception. Elles représentent l’écrasement, la superposition et la révélation de trois états de toiles fictives : - la première strate (en bleu - «blueprint»), présenterait une toile vue aux rayons x ; - la deuxième strate est constituée d’une tapisserie en « verdure » qui aurait été tissée sur la toile peinte ; - la troisième strate est celle, contemporaine, qui après gommage numérique, révélerait en partie la strate primitive et la ferait cohabiter avec la deuxième strate, créant une tierce image picturale, à mi-chemin entre présence et absence. 

Ainsi le présent est-il figuré par la matérialisation concrète d’une coexistence a priori impossible. 

Like a bottle thrown in the flows of time.

Forest II

– Oil and acrylic paint on linen, 89 cm x 116 cm – 2019.

Forest, wild place of probation and revelation, and piercing instrument (in French).

Assumption: X-rays would have allowed to see inside a tapestry;

before having been covered with threads, the linen cloth would have been painted,

and this uncovered painting has nothing to do with the pattern embroidered later.

Chutes ("Falls") is a sculpture composed of film rushes (each made of a hundred screenshots taken from Youtube), illustrating fails of people or elements; and presenting itself as a geyser or a waterfall…

Stromboli

– Video, 2 min 30, loop, silent – 2006.

sous titre

Sabemos de Aristarque

Exhibition view (Point I, II, III, IV, V) – 2016-2017.

CERN's LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the largest particle accelerator in the world, runs underground within a circular 10 km diameter path, near Geneva, straddling Switzerland and France.

This facility was chosen as the starting point for a work that is a reflection on space and time.

A tablet made out of clay was created to portray the LHC's course on which 12 points were placed to form a dodecagon. This tablet was then broken into 12 pieces (symboloï), so that each piece will display one of the dodecagon's vertices.

A trip was made to visit all locations in order to find the 12 points' corresponding landscapes based on their coordinates.

For each of the 12 points, a photograph was taken and its matching symbolon was buried in situ.

The twelve works that compose "Sabemos de Aristarque" are those "sun imprints" on which the dodecagon and the corresponding symbolon were painted.

If these works are irretrievably linked to their locations and their symboloï, they are also interrelated and forming a chain through space and time.

The website www.sabemosdearistarque.com has been created to keep track of their journey and the new shapes they will draw overtime, once linked to each other.

Sabemos de Aristarque thus co-exists within three parallel dimensions: the locations of each point and the shooting places; The works that have been produced and intended to travel; The website, memory of the origins and of all movements.

It may as well appear as a perpetually moving constellation.

This work is entitled "Sabemos de Aristarque" in honor of Aristarchus of Samos, the Greek mathematician and astronomer of the 3rd century BC, who deduced the distances between the Earth, The Moon and the Sun, as well as heliocentrism, based on the principles of geometry and his sole observations and the principles of geometry.

Sabemos de Aristarque

Point VIII, Photographic process, oil painting on paper on canvas, 40 cm x 50 cm – 2016-2017.

Sabemos de Aristarque

Point X, Photographic process, oil painting on paper on canvas, 40 cm x 50 cm – 2016-2017.

Sabemos de Aristarque

Capture d’écran du site www.sabemosdearistarque.com

En savoir plus :

The latin word Introrsum - designating in botany a «pistil turned inwards» - is here used for what it might refer to: intro-sum in latin, or «I’m inside».

If the mirror effect of the inside of the mask may evoke the myth of Narcissus, the impact produced here is more complex. Indeed, this mirror mask, with its concavities, distort the image of who would like to put it on.

The reflection is only faithful in the instant before the contact of the face with the mirror; after, the reflection is distorted again, since if the face might be seen in the wall mirror set in front of Introrsum, once the mask on, this face is no longer recognizable.

Therefore, «I’m inside» presents itself as a time experience: the past is deformed, the future is hidden; only the «I» present exists, in its extreme transience.