OFLUXO

These considerations are reflected in the artists’ gestures, whose conception of the various situations incorporates a moment of letting go and an autonomy of the materials influencing the stability of the works over time. In the same way that they observe their environment with profound gentleness, the artists play with technical, technological and artisanal prowess to compose works at the frontier of the living: the sensitive representations of nature appear all the more vibrant.

          At Le Port Des Créateurs, the exhibition by Clément Davout and Marie Lelouche roots the recollections of an intimate present by revealing the rhizomatic mechanisms of memory.

Inspired by the advertising expression of a famous brand of telephones, Marie Lelouche’s series of works, entitled “You Have a New Memory”, highlights our current behaviors linked to the increase in our capacities, through the daily use of technological tools, artificial intelligence and biological progress. The sculptures inhabit the space like three floating clouds, each with its own identity: named Andrea, Yuma and Ellis, they seem to contain a complexity of fragmented visual information, on the verge of erasure, complementing each other through their superposition. The entanglement of the forms suggests the neural connections active in the construction of memories. The artist works from recordings, images of pieces of architecture and urban furniture collected and taken out of their context, which she manipulates in a logic close to the practice of remix. Beyond the simple representation of a data storage, the sculptures / characters dialogue with each other via a chat application installed on three phones. Through writing, they question the necessity of memory and put into perspective the reliability of our own memory processes.

Clément Davout’s painting is itself an echo, built in successive layers, of the coloured sensation of a moment. He fixes on his canvases the representation of an interior landscape by using the plants of domestic spaces as models. In a sociological relationship, these plants are part of a collective history linked to the circulation and commercialisation of plants. His creative process combines several senses: after having photographed the plants observed, the artist processes them in various digital tools – including Instagram – to generate the coloured gradient. The private space is again suggested, that of the storage of data, identity and windows present in our connected phones. In the series of five paintings, the relationship to touch and surface appears in the organic forms of the plants, reduced here to dynamic and minimal curves, bordering on abstraction. In his diptych the same palm tree appears twice, like two shifted perceptions of the same space. His painting, devoid of human presence, emancipates the plants from all control and brings to the forefront the vital sensitivity of plants to light in a temporality that is foreign to us: a slow growth imposing a certain humility.

On the first floor, Sabrina Ratté’s video installation “Floralia” is presented as a moving diorama, where specimens of extinct plants are preserved. Conceived in synthetic images, the plants are nothing more than the recomposed archive of an erased nature, whose only trace would reside in a digital space. This infinite space of conservation – in its duration as in its proportions – allows the splitting up of plant species, which themselves become landscape: the work extrapolates the rebirth of this vegetation through the different periods of growth. The biological cycle becomes an explosive and technoid ballet which, in the absence of gravity, suggests the inaccessibility of an evaporated nature.

          The dialogue between the works of the artist duo Arthur Tramier & Tom Schneider and the collective Onformative plunges galerie l’axolotl into a wild environment where the residues of a constantly evolving nature rub shoulders with the formation of supernatural invasive organisms. 

The “Minajerie” device designed by Arthur Tramier & Tom Schneider at galerie l’axolotl is a synthesis between a functional object, the table, and an autonomous environment with all the biological interconnections necessary for its growth. Designed with organic, synthetic and industrial elements, the work allows the interaction of the living and the non-living in the same reality. It devours, absorbs, in a deliberately pop and wild cannibalistic act, the elements linked to its survival. Inspired by the silhouette of the plankton – the first link in the marine food chain, adorned with industrial fins and covered with a handmade latex stretched like a skin, the work reconfigures by analogies the capacities of adaptations of a species and biomimetic technicality, connects the universe of sports and animals, sexual and sophisticated, in a toxicity of forms associated with the typology of domestic objects. The universe told by Arthur Tramier & Tom Schneider is a point of tension, viral and parasitic but terribly glamorous, kinky like Nicki Minaj’s vocal range, where the fragility of the living is exhibited, provocative, in the floral compositions resulting from wild harvesting in collaboration with local producers.

Onformative collective presents “Meandering River”, an audiovisual installation composed of real-time images generated by an algorithm and music composed by an artificial intelligence. This digital artwork makes change perceptible by creating a unique awareness of time. Spanning multiple screens, the work reinterprets the changing behaviour of rivers by visualising and sounding their impact on the earth’s surface. Based on a bespoke algorithm, the rippling and oscillating movement examines the rhythm of natural forces. As the evolving patterns of « Meandering River” emerge, the viewer is left with a sense of awe at the unpredictability of change and the beauty of nature.