« In chemistry, a melting point -point de fusion- occurs when matter in its solid state melts and transitions to its liquid state. During this transition, solid and liquid coexist in the same fragment of time, which occurs at a constant temperature that makes this phenomenon possible. Melting, therefore, is a process of phase change – from solid to liquid – that operates by introducing heat energy into the system or substance, causing the atoms to move faster, increasing the collisions between them, breaking the rigid structure and thus, flowing. 

Encouraged by the idea of this chemical process, artists Juan Gugger and Xolo Cuintle (Romy Texier and Valentin Vie Binet) decide to meet in a thermal equilibrium, not because their discourses coincide especially in terms of concepts, but because of the intention given to them: that of cohabitation. In the horizontal architecture of the Poush dome, where their spaces of boiling and creation reside, the artists asked themselves what it is to erode, to confluence, to co-inhabit a space of approximately 2000 m2 with an industrial and now artistic-exhibitive history, respecting its architecture and suggesting a different way of intervening the dome. 

Thus, Point de fusion is a fortuitous encounter. A hatching. The superimposition of two apparently isolated ecosystems that meet for the first time. A chemical reaction in which materials and forms want to converge within the same choreography: a choreography of the subtle and the physical. Curiously, a melting point is also a regression to the original material, a distillation of matter in search of the raw substance. By associating the two aesthetics, a minefield of relations is created between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the non-organic, what we see and what we do not see, materiality and the ethereal. In effect, a potentiality denoted by the strange that proposes the construction of new ephemeral, timeless and mystical universes. 

Juan Gugger is a mental artist whose creative process is based on a time of reflection and on his life experiences conditioned by the operability within the current art system. His works establish complex systems of creation that start from a state of mind or a specific obsession. Thus, they become environments and site specifics that suggest new states of social, political and conceptual awareness. His discourse focuses on the impermanence of materials and their – possible – meaning, as well as on the intricacies of the material production of contemporary life. To do so, he recovers residual or out-of-circulation objects, developing a repetitive gesture of quasi-industrial production of the found object or ready-made. 

It is not only a matter of re-signifying the symbol of waste in order to confront its functionality or subjectivity, but of rescuing it, reproducing it, assembling it and re-using it as an action of resistance to the loss of materiality, offering the object other possible lives and interpretations. Broadly speaking, he is recurrently interested in architecture, not only for his installations of a spatial nature, but also for his focus on scale and three-dimensionality. His work delves into the relationship between the material extracted from nature, and that produced and standardized by man in the machinery of the capitalist system. 

Xolo Cuintle uses typical materials of industrial construction such as concrete in the creation of structures and forms inherent to the domestic interior space: chairs, pots, lamps, flowers, skirting boards, etc. Interested in ornamentation and its representations, they start from this origin and go beyond it, resigning their sculptures that speak more of temporality and intertextuality than of the very functionality of artifacts. Their works are objects out of time, anachronistic. They create artificial and imagined vegetations within a non-space and a non-place. There is no specific contextuality in Xolo Cuintle’s sculptures, but rather a timelessness that is traced in the duality between past and future, natural and artificial, materiality and éther. 

At times they build impossible landscapes, living rooms and scenographies anchored to nowhere, made up of concrete objects that seem to have always existed, “rooted” to the ground. Floating atmospheres in which we do not understand if something is about to happen or if everything has already passed. In others, they are fictional vegetations that find refuge in the space of the artificial: chandelier trees, bouncing flowers that germinate in concrete soil, resilient plants that readapt to the hostility and tension of an unfavorable climate to germinate, grow and even illuminate the new landscapes to come. Conceptions that bring us to a double dimensionality: the one we inhabit, the here and now, and another imagined and future one. » 

— Dayneris Brito, Paris, 2023