Choreography of Pictorial Fetishes

The Choreography of Pictorial Fetishes The artist in his studio is first and foremost a craftsman, an inventor who approaches art making as a physical and mental activity. His research starts with compositions on paper and expands into conceptual photographs and videos. A selection of drawings is cut apart to unveil raw, organic forms that are then assembled into mobiles and put in motion through a wide range of mechanical devices. Although these meticulously built insect-like machineries are moving, floating, flying with seemingly no apparent order in front of the camera, their movements are, in fact, orchestrated with care and calculated restraint. And it is the unseen trajectory of the dancing parts of these hybrid creations that is revealed by the subsequent photographs. Thus, through the lens, the process itself disappears. Translucent mylar, dusty charcoal in milky bath, discrete strings linked to syncopating motors,... all shift from concrete material to mental representations of the unknown. The physicality of the source material is lost and its trace only emerges or disintegrates on the surface of the picture plane. Going back and forth from certitude to wonder, the fluidity of a movement becomes solid or, in the contrary, forms and colors fuse and melt into ghostly substances. When the mechanical investigation of the ephemeral tension between object, light and movement generates the unforeseen, we are faced with unidentified yet strangely familiar structures. At once primal and undecided, visceral and vulnerable. Born from the fragmentation of an intangible moment and the subtlety of its serendipitous variations, the photograph leaves us with the remembrance of the experience. The remembrance of the loss.