M-PR_1, M-PR_2, M-PR_3, M-PR_4, M-PR_5, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PV_6, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PR_4, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

" Interfaces, or those who caress the surface "

text written for Interface Berlin

Where abscissa and ordinate axes meet, there are points of contact. From these landmarks, territories are created that continually communicate, interpenetrate and move away from each other. We approach these spaces, by creating zones punctuated by our meetings and exchanges. These places where worlds brush against each other are infrathin 1 interfaces, membranes which embrace our interconnections.

First, there is the world’s vast space. From its maritime vibrations to the rhythm of the swell on its surface. There are telluric expanses pierced by roots and architectural perspectives. Within them, human and non-human skins deploy bodily and sensual conversations. The beauty of the notion of interface is that it proposes to reconsider the artwork as a surface accessible from its positive and negative sides. It opens up a space which escapes planarity, which draws its potentialities from a depth of field. As interfaces, artworks open worlds. Acting both as a screen and as a meeting place, they offer spaces of creation, invite us to penetrate and animate them with our interactions.

The idea of a permeability of interfaces is the key to this exhibition. The artists presented create spaces allowing for passages, for encounters. Their works call for a haptic experience.

Which is the surface, then, that caresses that of the other?

Within the exhibition space, itself an interface, the artists offer multiple approaches to this notion of permeability. When two hands move towards the surface of a plane, the skin itself becomes the surface through which the conversation with the world can take place. A dialectic thus opens, from the inner space towards an evoked place. The works build structures and create spaces of circulation and intimacy that resist us as much as they invite us in. In some, surfaces can be passed through in a vibratory and organic initiation. The artists stretch the plane of the exhibition towards an else-where that envelops us from the distant elsewhere in which it resides. The permeability of the presented surfaces allows us to envision that which, however infinitely distant, makes a step towards us. The interface can thus be seen as a potential for territorialization. The artists create immanent planes acting both as relics and potential futures, and these fragments scattered throughout the exhibition promise metamorphoses. The works gathered in this interior/exterior space formulate and offer access to intuitions which emerged from an embrace with the « surface’s deep essence »2.

The exhibition proposes to envisage the depth of surfaces which we thought were impermeable. The artists reveal what lies beyond the surface of the works. Yet to caress the surface, one must be there, and stand prepared for an encounter. In order to open fundamental conversations and invite empathy towards species and worlds.

1 Marcel Duchamp

2 三島 由紀夫, Mishima Yukio

M-PR_3, M-PB_3, M-PB_4, M-PR_2, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PB_2, M-PB_1, M-PV_1, M-PV_2, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

LB (the shore), 2021, boat varnish, carved wood, 40x20 cm each

La fleur Phaéthon Partie II, 2021, old horse saddle, sewn together rhombuses in cotton muslin, variable dimensions

M-PB_5, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PB_1, M-PR_3, M-PR_2, M-PG_1, M-PG_2, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

FM_1, FM_2, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on Arches paper, 90x63 cm

FM_10, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on Arches paper, 90x63 cm

FM_14, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on Arches paper, 90x63 cm

La fleur Phaéthon Partie I, 2021, old horse saddle, sewn together rhombuses in cotton muslin, variable dimensions

La fleur Phaéthon Partie II, 2021, old horse saddle, sewn together rhombuses in cotton muslin, variable dimensions

La Méditerrannée, Bubenberg, Paris, June 2020

"if a clod be washed away by the sea" (after John Donne), 2020, 20 analog photographs

performance with a fish net cyanotype canvas framed on a wooden pallet

Recognition

editorial written for Publication d'Art Non linéaire

Our land is an immanent island framed by the sea. On the waves, conscious of our common destiny, we are standing together at the bow of a ship set out on a reconnaissance mission. The spaces traced by our pencil strokes compose superimposed realities.

One reality unites us all: an insular land surrounded by infinite foam. This land we walk on, inhabit, describe, draw, photograph, measure, takes shape within us and is defined by all the events we share, experience, archive. We state that our intuitions emerge in the tangible world to unite with it and to form one same entity. As we create, we inflect the spacetime continuum, from our inner realities towards external dynamics.

We must reconnoiter this land we live on, starting by accepting “ the absolute non-reponse”1, that is to say, “the infinite without a path”.2

Recognizing each other’s perspectives defines new terms towards creating a language that will bring us together around current issues, reflections and collective artworks. In 1978, Nelson Goodman already wrote that taking “water from scattered places” wasn’t enough, “rather, we must coordinate the samples”.3

At last, we must reaffirm the idea of unity and abolish any opposition between what we can reality and ourselves. The world is not finite, it cannot be. Time is circular, and as a waterspouts suck up the sky to throw it into the ocean, past continually rushes towards future in a permanent to-and-fro. From ancestral times to the present day, our earth, like any work of art, continually recreates itself. We propose to acknowledge that every thought emits a new world, to recognize art as a means of rediscovery and as a driving force. To recognize, also that our earth exists independently of Humankind, and that if it exists independently, to affirm that it does not confront us. We have the opportunity to reinvent our relationship to the world by rethinking and re-founding our creative acts, towards an art that extends its own definition and creates new space-times. We ought to save the world’s soul, by preserving it in our memories, worlds in themselves. We are in perpetual motion, in permanent reinvention. Subjected to climate change just as we are to multiple intuitions.

Recognition means finding new ways of apprehending reality, new ways of being present in the face of an imminent future. In order to retain what must be retained and to let the sea wash away what must not be pursued, we must go beyond our finitudes, raise anchor, cast off and sail towards a collective destiny. Recognition is the intuition that there remains places to discover, thoughts to build, explorations to undertake, together.

1 Simon Hantai

2 Pablo Neruda

3 Nelson Goodman

Daily Lazy Projects, Athens, September 2019

Constellation, 2020, sewn together rhombuses made of an old boat cover and wood, variable dimensions

Le serpent-monde ou l'autre, 2020, sewn together rhombuses made of acrylic and cyanotypes on canvas, variable dimensions

49T-3, rolled up/unrolled, 2018-2020, 49 sewn together rhombuses made of acrylic, clay, fabrics, 240x120 cm

M-PR_1, M-PR_2, M-PR_3, M-PR_4, M-PR_5, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PV_6, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PR_4, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

" Interfaces, or those who caress the surface "

text written for Interface Berlin

Where abscissa and ordinate axes meet, there are points of contact. From these landmarks, territories are created that continually communicate, interpenetrate and move away from each other. We approach these spaces, by creating zones punctuated by our meetings and exchanges. These places where worlds brush against each other are infrathin 1 interfaces, membranes which embrace our interconnections.

First, there is the world’s vast space. From its maritime vibrations to the rhythm of the swell on its surface. There are telluric expanses pierced by roots and architectural perspectives. Within them, human and non-human skins deploy bodily and sensual conversations. The beauty of the notion of interface is that it proposes to reconsider the artwork as a surface accessible from its positive and negative sides. It opens up a space which escapes planarity, which draws its potentialities from a depth of field. As interfaces, artworks open worlds. Acting both as a screen and as a meeting place, they offer spaces of creation, invite us to penetrate and animate them with our interactions.

The idea of a permeability of interfaces is the key to this exhibition. The artists presented create spaces allowing for passages, for encounters. Their works call for a haptic experience.

Which is the surface, then, that caresses that of the other?

Within the exhibition space, itself an interface, the artists offer multiple approaches to this notion of permeability. When two hands move towards the surface of a plane, the skin itself becomes the surface through which the conversation with the world can take place. A dialectic thus opens, from the inner space towards an evoked place. The works build structures and create spaces of circulation and intimacy that resist us as much as they invite us in. In some, surfaces can be passed through in a vibratory and organic initiation. The artists stretch the plane of the exhibition towards an else-where that envelops us from the distant elsewhere in which it resides. The permeability of the presented surfaces allows us to envision that which, however infinitely distant, makes a step towards us. The interface can thus be seen as a potential for territorialization. The artists create immanent planes acting both as relics and potential futures, and these fragments scattered throughout the exhibition promise metamorphoses. The works gathered in this interior/exterior space formulate and offer access to intuitions which emerged from an embrace with the « surface’s deep essence »2.

The exhibition proposes to envisage the depth of surfaces which we thought were impermeable. The artists reveal what lies beyond the surface of the works. Yet to caress the surface, one must be there, and stand prepared for an encounter. In order to open fundamental conversations and invite empathy towards species and worlds.

1 Marcel Duchamp

2 三島 由紀夫, Mishima Yukio

M-PR_3, M-PB_3, M-PB_4, M-PR_2, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PB_2, M-PB_1, M-PV_1, M-PV_2, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

LB (the shore), 2021, boat varnish, carved wood, 40x20 cm each

La fleur Phaéthon Partie II, 2021, old horse saddle, sewn together rhombuses in cotton muslin, variable dimensions

M-PB_5, 2021, watercolor, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

M-PB_1, M-PR_3, M-PR_2, M-PG_1, M-PG_2, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on canvas, 130x70 cm

FM_1, FM_2, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on Arches paper, 90x63 cm

FM_10, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on Arches paper, 90x63 cm

FM_14, 2021, watercolor, ink, acrylic on Arches paper, 90x63 cm

La fleur Phaéthon Partie I, 2021, old horse saddle, sewn together rhombuses in cotton muslin, variable dimensions

La fleur Phaéthon Partie II, 2021, old horse saddle, sewn together rhombuses in cotton muslin, variable dimensions

La Méditerrannée, Bubenberg, Paris, June 2020

"if a clod be washed away by the sea" (after John Donne), 2020, 20 analog photographs

performance with a fish net cyanotype canvas framed on a wooden pallet

Recognition

editorial written for Publication d'Art Non linéaire

Our land is an immanent island framed by the sea. On the waves, conscious of our common destiny, we are standing together at the bow of a ship set out on a reconnaissance mission. The spaces traced by our pencil strokes compose superimposed realities.

One reality unites us all: an insular land surrounded by infinite foam. This land we walk on, inhabit, describe, draw, photograph, measure, takes shape within us and is defined by all the events we share, experience, archive. We state that our intuitions emerge in the tangible world to unite with it and to form one same entity. As we create, we inflect the spacetime continuum, from our inner realities towards external dynamics.

We must reconnoiter this land we live on, starting by accepting “ the absolute non-reponse”1, that is to say, “the infinite without a path”.2

Recognizing each other’s perspectives defines new terms towards creating a language that will bring us together around current issues, reflections and collective artworks. In 1978, Nelson Goodman already wrote that taking “water from scattered places” wasn’t enough, “rather, we must coordinate the samples”.3

At last, we must reaffirm the idea of unity and abolish any opposition between what we can reality and ourselves. The world is not finite, it cannot be. Time is circular, and as a waterspouts suck up the sky to throw it into the ocean, past continually rushes towards future in a permanent to-and-fro. From ancestral times to the present day, our earth, like any work of art, continually recreates itself. We propose to acknowledge that every thought emits a new world, to recognize art as a means of rediscovery and as a driving force. To recognize, also that our earth exists independently of Humankind, and that if it exists independently, to affirm that it does not confront us. We have the opportunity to reinvent our relationship to the world by rethinking and re-founding our creative acts, towards an art that extends its own definition and creates new space-times. We ought to save the world’s soul, by preserving it in our memories, worlds in themselves. We are in perpetual motion, in permanent reinvention. Subjected to climate change just as we are to multiple intuitions.

Recognition means finding new ways of apprehending reality, new ways of being present in the face of an imminent future. In order to retain what must be retained and to let the sea wash away what must not be pursued, we must go beyond our finitudes, raise anchor, cast off and sail towards a collective destiny. Recognition is the intuition that there remains places to discover, thoughts to build, explorations to undertake, together.

1 Simon Hantai

2 Pablo Neruda

3 Nelson Goodman

Daily Lazy Projects, Athens, September 2019

Constellation, 2020, sewn together rhombuses made of an old boat cover and wood, variable dimensions

Le serpent-monde ou l'autre, 2020, sewn together rhombuses made of acrylic and cyanotypes on canvas, variable dimensions

49T-3, rolled up/unrolled, 2018-2020, 49 sewn together rhombuses made of acrylic, clay, fabrics, 240x120 cm