Variations like so many passages, paths traced in dotted line to the meeting of works which try to seize the oscillation between the continuity and the rupture, the swing of a state towards another, the transformation which works and crosses the image. This selection is essentially composed of video works but also of devices that will be arranged in the gallery space and will propose singular universes.
Through these works we experience change and metamorphosis affecting the body as well as the image and the material. Antoine Boutet's Zone of Initial Dilution bears witness to the pro-chain disappearance of traditions and customs in order to change the landscape and architecture. Carolina Saquel's and Karø Goldt's portraits illustrate tenuous variations between immobility and the twisting of the horizon line in Un Portrait peut avoir un fond neutre or of the features of a face in N u, of a landscape of lines and colors in Subrosa. Maïder Fortuné's work draws permanent parallels between two seemingly distinct but elusive images and worlds. The animations and video of Catherine Helmer operate shifts of forms, like so many bodily mutations drawing the continuity through a line that never breaks. Finally, the last transformation in the work of Noëlle Pujol who films an intervention on the form and nature of a body: the passage from death to immortality.
These displacements, which are inscribed in the material of a landscape, a body or a face, echo displacements of time, space and meaning. The spatial and sensory shift is at the heart of Mira Sanders' work, which relies on reality to transport us into an inverted elsewhere. Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil's work constantly creates unexpected formal shifts, often funny and always ironic. This subversive and voluntarily displaced line is also illustrated in Jean-Paul Labro's installation, which critically questions our position as viewers and the fictional universe in which we are immersed.
Transformations and variations - consequential or minute - transcend this perpetual movement of life, these slow or accelerated, violent or gentle fluctuations, and build our relationship to time, unwinding the senses in motion. This grouping of works reflects an availability to the world, a lucid and generous look, images that offer themselves and that are colored neither by indifference nor by coldness. The exhibition draws its strength from the choice of artists for whom creation seems to be inscribed in the gift made to the other, in the possibility, through representation, of recognizing oneself.
Variations also brings together artists without a gallery - whose work is regularly shown through collective or personal exhibitions, many of them in prestigious venues. This is an opportunity to offer them a visibility and an opening other than those offered by public institutions.
Antoine Boutet Zone of Initial Dilution France, 2006, 30 mn Born in 1968, lives and works in Montreuil. Through his landscape installations, Antoine Boutet focuses his work on urban mutations and their resonance on the population.
lation. Zone of Initial Dilution bears witness to the upheaval of the Yangtze River in China and the progressive erasure of a way of life and local practices. New relationships with the river, new centralities, issues of power and representation, this study through images attempts to identify certain consequences on the landscape and populations in the planned perspective of the ultimate rise of the waters.
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil Excuse de provocation (Thematic guided tour; Security and Heritage of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris), France, 2001, 35 mn Born in 1968, lives and works in Paris.
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil takes an acute and ironic look at our ultra-monitored society and attacks the systematic dismantling of the workings of these protection systems. As an observer and inventor of camouflage procedures, he plays with all the structures of social control that surround us. Institutions, cities and media are filtered through his shifted and intra-table eye that highlights what we deliberately ignore. His work proposes incessant reversals and is based on a balance between formal concerns and political questioning.
Maïder Fortuné I wasn't crying, but the ground wasn't still France, 2005, 12 mn Born in 1973, lives and works in Paris. Maïder Fortuné's works are as many aesthetic stagings drawing fictions of bodily presences, virtual presences strangely incarnated. Each image proposes a situation where the body seems to take place in a narrative that oscillates between fable and mystery. I wasn't crying but the ground wasn't still explores the hidden meaning of the gesture, of the movement of the bodies through the passage from the inside to the outside, from the technique to the nature, between real and imaginary. Passages of bodies and scenery - driven by "magical forces" - organize the scene according to an order that remains mysterious to us.
Karø Goldt Nu Germany, 2005, 4 mn 30 / Subrosa Germany, 2004, 3 mn Born in 1967, lives and works in Berlin. Karø Goldt's work, with its minimalist grammar, reaches a peak of intensity thanks to the reduction of its formal meaning. Although her images are suggested by a process of extreme abstraction, they nevertheless have a tangible materiality, amplified by the sound composition of her films. Nude and Subrosa show the imperceptible change, the scrolling of lines, the variations of colors and forms. Here the sounds of music give rhythm to the images, scandalize the unfolding of time and the perception of the frame, give meaning to the ruptures through continuity as well as to the permanence through movement.
Catherine Helmer Particules : Oubli France, 2006, 3 mn 05 / Particules : Sommeil France, 2006, 1 mn 16 / Particules : Souffle France, 2006, 1 mn 48 / Respire France, 2006, 14 mn 58 Born in 1972, lives and works in Paris.
Catherine Helmer's works testify to this tireless search for the seizure of oneself through the experience of the body inevitably crossed by time and declining under the sign of metamorphosis. Body-woman, body-fetus, fertile body which moves slowly, which grows then collapses, falls to be reborn. A fertile body of life and language, a body-word that crosses the cycles of nature and that lets glimpse an inhabited and isolated interiority. So many self-portraits that illustrate the shifts from one form to another, rites of passage sublimated by the body.
Jean-Paul Labro Présentoir à posters installation, France, 2006 Born in 1969, lives and works in Bourges and in the Hautes-Pyrénées. Jean-Paul Labro invests his energy in performance, the invention of machines or interactive devices. His Display
à posters, a device that can be consulted by the public, proposes images close to cinema posters whose origin remains uncertain. The general imagery of the posters raises an aesthetic close to the documentary film of anticipation (that is to say a pure fiction) where it is a question of following a group of explorers in their excursion and their work of discovery and analysis of the saturations of the present world.
Noëlle Pujol Le Préparateur France, 2006, 37 mn Born in 1972, lives and works in Saint-Ouen. In Le Préparateur, Noëlle Pujol undertakes a work of encounter, a movement towards the real, in the laboratory of a taxi-dermatist.
dermist. The taxidermy aims at reconstituting the body of a dead animal to give him a semblance of life. The goal is fictitious but the "work in acts" - transforming a dead immobile body, emptying it to keep only the skin - touches a documentary form. The film works on the forms of shifts in the arts: how can a dead body go from photography to drawing to sculpture to theater?
Mira Sanders Excerpt of a Day Belgium, 2005-06, 4 mn 45 Born in 1973, lives and works in Brussels. Mira Sanders' work is crossed by the theme of representation and illusion. The artist plays with the borders between reality and fiction, image and object of the world, and constantly pushes us to ask ourselves what truth we inhabit. Excerpt of a Day confronts two modalities of the seizure of the real and its acceptance: the sight and the hearing put back to back to the profit a priori of the ear. The object of the video is emptied of its matter - imagined - but not of its meaning, the knowledge passes by the sound and the imagination.
Carolina Saquel Un Portrait peut avoir un fond neutre France, 2005, 15 mn Born in 1970, lives and works in Paris. Carolina Saquel focuses on the question of perception, the meaning of gestures and situations that can be considered
as unimportant. A Portait may have a neutral background, shot on the high seas on a stationary boat, shows images of the horizon of the sea and the recording of the movements of a line that we think is fixed and stable. Yet this line oscillates, breaks, moves. The existence of a support is questioned, of a firm ground on which the glance would come to rest.