Elise Bergonzi, curator
Permanente Instance, 2024
As places of transformation in a quasi-clinical world, Anaïs Gauthier’s immersive installations hybridize the organic with the industrial. They are activated as a body-machine that comes to break the silence to explore our contemporary mechanisms of care. The artist proposes here an in-situ installation in two parts: a factory of the intimate that is mechanized, an imperfect machinery that becomes humanized. Unidentified hybrid forms question the mechanization of our bodies at work and their potential failure. The gears seem ready to shake like vital organs, but a permanent seepage comes betraying their emotional overheating.
In the second space designed to accommodate the artist in residence, Anaïs Gauthier created an organization at its best. There is something alive that rustles in the curvature of its nonchalant forms. The hairless cavity overpowers us with a weighted weight and draws us to the bottom. In the raucous chest cavity that serves as its belly, the motor snorts and expels a moist steam. Its metal frame is partially covered with flesh, the inside of the body merges with the outside and each organ clings to the structure as it can. Gears and pulleys are maintained in operation by a complex network of overheated pipes and bubbles. Crossed by viscous fluids, this intubated chimera seems to be able to produce unidentified forms at the chain. But this production system seems unstable, the slightest drop of excess water could make it give way under its own weight. By the force of oozing through all these pores, the production line is stuck like a dried mucosa, retracting its surgical claws in a choked squeak. But instead of taking a breath and swallowing, the machine continues its breathing exercises, refusing to see its inefficiency. There is a certain tenderness in this damaged thing that tries to do its best to follow its own rhythm. This stunted motorized system, which starts and stops with slight jolts before timidly leaving in an indecisive craze, humbly reminds us of our own limits. In the manner of a kneecap that cracks when trying to unfold itself to take a step forward, Anaïs Gauthier’s partially dysfunctional machines resemble us a little too closely. The bodies she makes are as tired as they are shiny, as if one had wanted to polish their surfaces without making sure that they were well greased beforehand. The mechanisms are gripped, fallible and painful, but they maintain a smile of bitter facade that twitches at the slightest movement. The artist pushes to its last entrenchment the analogy of the body-machine and human creations that could not be anything other than our image: effective as long as we feed them, functional as long as they are not submerged. This overflow, when it manifests itself, can be illustrated both in a motor problem and in mental distress. When our bodies become exhausted, we are only further deprived. In an accumulation of more or less risky care gestures, their maintenance generates other machineries that could also fail. They must then be maintained and repaired at best, or replaced with more waste at worst.
This vicious circle, symbol of an alienated industry and symptomatic of our capitalist production systems, crosses the works produced by Anaïs Gauthier. However, at the heart of this socio-ecological observation about our daily operating methods, something touching is visible between the poisonous membranes of the organic plant of Anaïs Gauthier. Behind the binarity of a mechanical and cyclic movement which, instead of remaining in a nauseous fluidity, rubs, cracks, gets stuck, erodes and exhausts itself passively; there is still the possibility of a resilient gear that refuses to shut off. A form of vain but always undefeated persistence then enters between the forms. And in this fallible permanence of our bodies, there is always a somewhat guilty pleasure for failure.
Zélia Bajaj, curator
With a shared interest in latent and organic forms, visual artist Anaïs Gauthier and curator Zélia Bajaj have imagined this collaborative exhibition project. The dialogue initiated between our respective practices and research calls for new, plural readings, the forms of which aim to convey a multiplicity of viewpoints. In the context of this call for projects, we see the exhibition as a platform for encounter and exchange, where the experience of the visit is central from the outset.
Presenting four installations by Anaïs Gauthier, already produced or in progress, the exhibition draws on phenomena of incarnation, latency and flow, both physical and psychic, to question the perception of the body in space, through the alteration of time. Emotions are at stake: what place can we give them in an exhibition dealing with the body? Based on a phenomenological conception of the body, can we experience time and space differently? As architecture and artworks rub shoulders in a transformed biomechanical universe, where time seems suspended in space, the curatorial proposal borrows a form of impertinence from play, as a playful executory, however unpredictable. Spread over two floors, it invites visitors to progressively enter the reclusive spaces of the gallery, descending into its bowels, to share a succession of experiences, hidden from view. Placed end to end, they give shape to a chronological rhizome, whose interdependence of events enables us to escape the compartmentalization of spaces and the suspension of time1.
Anaïs Gauthier’s practice is characterized by the physicality, even corporality, that she confers on her sculptures. The artist draws on architectural references and furniture to create ephemeral installations, where the organic and the mechanical merge into one another. Often in situ, his installations come to life in the exhibition space, introducing us to offbeat worlds where time is materialized through repetition, suspension or fragmentation. Through their immersive, sensory dimension, they disrupt our spatio-temporal reference points, implanting dysfunctional or fluctuating elements into mechanical apparatus. At the entrance to Espace temps, a new work by the artist, visible from the street, depicts a fall of matter suspended in time. Through its latent dimension, it evokes the possibility of a flow, a metamorphosis, if matter regains its mobility2. Ultimately, it’s our emotions that – in contact with the works – set themselves in motion, before spreading throughout the exhibition space. This large-scale installation would take place in a cold, aseptic, almost eerie environment, with a clinical, laboratory-like aesthetic. The sound of a bell, produced from below by the installation Intranquillité titillante, would then guide us towards the stairs. Direction: the basement, where the senses are permanently awakened.
Playing with segmented spaces and interstices, the exhibition questions the threshold between two spaces, and its relationship to the body. As the compartmentalization of works in space constrains the gaze, the idea is to abandon the idea of an overall view in favor of the discovery of a hidden life. In this context, corridors and staircases have a liminal function: at the edge of different spaces, these places of passage make tangible the transitory experience that underlies the exhibition rooms, in a back-and-forth movement (also an outlet). The cold aesthetic of the first floor, where the body is placed at a distance, is followed by the intimacy of the basement, for a more visceral embodiment. Like a chapel, with its vaulted arches, the underground space brings to light what is usually buried. By activating the sculptures, whose shapes respond to those of the site, the architecture acts as a catalyst for affects, flows and fluids.
Presented on either side of the staircase, the installations Double Contrainte (2023) and Intranquillité titillante (2021) induce situations of flow and latency, where the circulation of fluids gives rise to a change of state. If the fluids are akin to moods, whose thickness is revealed by the phenomenon of condensation, the passage through these spaces, invested from floor to ceiling, is likely to summon – as well – different states of consciousness. Finally, the draperies in the Sirupeux linceuls series, scattered across all levels, manifest themselves in the interstitial spaces as a set of traces to be followed. Linking the installations and the exhibition rooms, they would recall the fragmentation of the body at work in each piece. In this way, the exhibition brings together the different phases of the artist’s research, having experimented with huis-clos-like forms before introducing the visitor’s body into installations that are more immersive than contemplative, in order to explore the visual dimension of haptics3. Haptics arouse tactile temptations at the mere sight of certain textures or formal appearances, without the need to mobilize the sense of touch. Suspended or fragmented in space, time and the body appear as tangible objects that can be acted upon.
1 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris, Minuit, 1980.
2 Julie Noirot, « Produire des « images manquantes ». Le projet Wonder Beiruth de Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige », Focales, n° 1, 2017.
3 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film : Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham (NC), Duke University Press, 2000.
Lena Peyrard, curator and critic
Opération Stase, 2023
Even before you enter the installation, as if you were entering a sacred mechanical womb, there’s the sound. The gentle lapping of fluids escaping from their matrix, the whirring of winches in continuous back-and-forth motion. At the bottom of the stairs, a chandelier sways in the hollow of a skylight. It heralds the kinetic waltz being played out further up. And then we’re there. Where? We can’t say for sure. Revealed, replayed, extended, the architecture of the site almost fades away, giving way to an environment made up of strata that form a choir. A suspended rhizome of piping pierces the room from one side to the other, allowing fluids to circulate and the system at work to be intricately networked. At the ends of the pipes, two chandeliers made of a superimposition of stainless steel, wax and silicone are lowered in a resolutely dramatic manner. As they lower, they sink into milky water contained in large tanks covered with pale blue and green mosaics. The whole is intertwined in a space that has become the support for a fantasy of flesh and steel.
The very title of the work, Opération Stase, evokes an introspection as much as a desire to observe what is latent, to scrutinize the deep mechanics of the universe that generally escape our gaze. Anaïs Gauthier plunges us into the heart of an aseptic environment, somewhere between the medical and industrial worlds. Ultimately, it’s a question of “taking care of things”, as Jérôme Denis and David Pontille put it in their eponymous book1, exploring the fragility that surrounds us and the notion of maintenance as “the art of making things last”. This care of things is also the care of all bodies, damaged, fragmented and imperfect, which find refuge in this architecture where mosaics dominate, reminiscent of hammams and thermal baths. Symbolically, water occupies a central place in this piece, both purifying and uncontrollable, like an elusive force. However, the balance seems to waver, as the installation suggests a possible malfunction. A paradox emerges: this space, designed to provide care, is tainted by the black dust of this former industrial wasteland, as if damaged by time and hardship. The sprawling steel network that runs through the space, meanwhile, is reminiscent of a malfunctioning mechanism: the pipes that make it up are patchily sealed with fabric, in an attempt to control brazen leaks.
Fragile and irrigated by a mysterious source, the installation reveals itself to be alive, vibrant with colors that evoke the vigor of an organism in perpetual motion. Here, the failure is that of machines and bodies, two entities that seem to merge within the work. Questioning the devices of power that alienate them both, the artist envisages their emancipation through metamorphosis and their possible mutations. This brings to mind Silvia Federici and her book Par-delà les frontières du corps (Beyond the Boundaries of the Body)2 , which sees the body as a historical, domesticated and violated object to be reappropriated. Silvia Federici suggests: let’s listen carefully to the language of the body, grasping its fragility and imperfections, in order to re-establish the magical connection that unites us and thus overcome the artificial limits that separate us. Similarly, Anaïs Gauthier transfigures industrial vocabulary to question the alteration of bodies and attempt to repair them. Opération Stase is like a visual enigma, a delicate, sensory, existential territory that plunges us into an “affectology” specific to the sphere of care. The artist’s installation takes us on a journey in search of meaning, inviting us to observe the unobservable and ponder its latent fragility.
1 Jérôme Denis, David Pontille « Le soin des choses : politique de la maintenance », 2022. Editions la Découverte
2 Silvia Federici « Par-delà les frontières du corps », 2020. Editions Divergences
Lisa Eymet, curator
Défaillance systémique, 2020
Traversing the space, a motorized belt drives four suspended sculptures in a closed circuit. They slide along the belt, turn slightly on themselves, rise and fall. A series of chain reactions subjects them in turn to opposing forces.
Défaillance systémique is a merry-go-round, a theater of motor-activated forms that immerse, bump and scrape them in a process of composition and decomposition. Transparent fabrics, absorbent cotton, silicone, wax, seeds and coral lentils… Anaïs Gauthier arranges the materials she incorporates into stratigraphic layers. She trusts her intuitions, takes the measure, rebalances and responds to the demands of a material she is learning about. She gives birth to hollowed-out forms, made of folds, textures and protuberances: hems of material that attract the eye as much as the hand. We’d love to plunge our fingers into them, delving into their nooks and crannies to grasp their structure, which is at once soft, hard and crumbly.
Oscillating from beige to pearly pink, they evoke both a piece of flesh and a marshmallow being kneaded. Above ground, they exude something hybrid and almost monstrous, between the dead and the living, the human and the non-human. Without origin or destination, unspeakable yet present in the world, the suspended sculptures are states of matter, forms in the making that meet in their path a sum of salvaged or reconstructed objects: factory furniture.
When the engines start up, the factory comes to life in an arrangement of metal and organic materials. The deafening sound of the endless screw recalls François Bon’s painful descriptions in Sortie d’usine (1982), when he recounts the alienation of bodies at work, enclosed, amputated and deafened by the clatter of machines. Anaïs Gauthier prefers the whirring of structures, the vibrations of start-up, the din and bang of detonations to the perfectly oiled cogs, smooth cleanliness and silence of cutting-edge technology. Nothing is hidden from view. The mechanisms are naked, without envelope, and behind a massive and stable appearance, the whole installation reveals its fragility, which is compensated for by stakes fixed to the floor and walls.
Anaïs Gauthier’s sculptural practice is built on a balance of sensations. She navigates freely between fascination and disgust, attraction and unease for the forms she creates. While provoking our initial rejection, she summons up buried childhood memories: the pleasure of seeing elements come to life through the magical action of cogs, the satisfaction of seeing materials soak, decant, disgorge and splatter the floor with dirt. Combining the playful with the terrifying, Défaillance systémique leaves us in doubt as to the function of the machine at work. Like a living organism, it seems capable of surprises and accidents, exerting forces with uncertain consequences.
As close as we get to the installation, the only thing that seems to matter is the formal question of what happens to the material: we pay curious attention to its responses and mutations under the effect of hammering, friction and mechanized gestures. While Défaillance systémique is reminiscent of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Le cour des choses (1987) in its exploration of chain reactions, the distance allowed by the device suggests other readings. On leaving the room, visitors extract themselves from the huis-clos and observe the ongoing processes from “behind the glass”. The hypnotic, infinite round of shadows and shapes becomes a hellish factory of mass-produced, shaped, worn and damaged bodies. In 1990, in Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle2, Deleuze describes how each society, through the production machines it builds, develops its own modes of controlling individuals. Behind playful assemblages, materiological encounters and paradoxical associations of objects and forms, Anaïs Gauthier translates the sense of arbitrary violence administered to bodies. With Défaillance systémique, she offers viewers an equivalent of her own experience of being a captive human being in a system built on control and constraint, which the emergence of individuality can corrupt and derail.
Georges Peignard, artist and teacher at EESAB
Anaïs Gauthier has developed striking works that combine an awareness of space and its challenges with a questioning of the functionalities and movements that are real or implicit in their presence. This sincere and generous commitment to the construction process has always allowed him to formulate highly precise questions about the history and current status of sculpture.
Today, as an artist, Anaïs Gauthier carries within her a singular universe of creations with echoes of objects, furniture or machines, never content with ease or renunciation. To come face to face with her works, to move between them, is to feel the questioning of our own place, of the responsibility of our actions, of our surpassing ourselves.
Anaïs knows how to accompany the full scope of her constructions, and has the rare intelligence to approach both knowledge and know-how with balance. For those of us who receive them, each assemblage evaluates a complex evidence of the link that unites the things around us. She invents hybrids which, in the unexpectedness of their ancestry, come to us in performances and possibilities, at a standstill, in suspended time, already marked on their surfaces by a previous experience. His works exist as much by their memory as by their absolute novelty. It is through this imbalance, through their obviousness of being there, of having always been there, that they profoundly question our own place, here, in this moment.
Romain Mathieu, critic and curator
in Art Press
Anaïs Gauthier’s sculptures are first and foremost intriguing machines, paradoxical structures. Altercation is the meeting of a metal crane, whose black cogs seem to have survived a vanished industrial world, and a raw-earth construction that rises like a sort of honeycomb pyramid, evoking the habitat of a few insects. The former, with its absurd, mechanical movement, destroys the latter, inscribing the material and decorative refinement of its forms in the ephemeral.
Elsewhere, there’s a swing on which hangs a tire partially covered with a ceramic whose shape and color resemble a piece of flesh. Once again, this incongruous encounter between a wheel and this pinkish excrescence arouses both desire, particularly to touch, and repulsion for this piece of body associated with black rubber. The movement is latent, and the eroticism of this flesh is ambiguous. The all-too-frequently-used phrase “disturbing strangeness” finds its most accurate use here. Freud associates this anxiety with the impression that an inanimate being is alive, but it also manifests itself in the memory of L’homme au rat, with the desire to see the naked body of a woman in contradiction with a forbidden act. The disquieting strangeness disrupts our usual relationship with reality, revealing something that should have remained hidden. Is that why this work is called L’escarpolette?
She refers to a painting by Fragonard, in which a “happy chance” transforms the flight of a shoe on a swing into the unveiling of his mistress’s crotch to the hidden lover. The combination of contradictory elements, movement and destruction are not just formal issues, but summon up the desire that drives these forms and the anguish that engulfs them. If these sculptures are at once familiar and bizarre, it’s because they lead us towards that disturbance of perception where language is lacking. The inability to be said is the hallmark of plastic expression, but it’s actually quite rare for a work to confront us with this in such a direct way.
“What resides in machines is human reality, human gesture fixed and crystallized in structures that function” Gilbert Simondon
Both organic and manufactured elements are brought together in my work, drawing on architectural references and furniture. These juxtapositions allow me to question the physical relationship to transformation based on movement, echoing the industrial system we inherit. I look at the effect it has on our bodies and, more broadly, at the design that infuses our lifestyles and perceptions. Through installations, I stage a factory of the intimate and a space of production or training. My visual research proposes the beginnings of alternative narratives based on indefiniteness and metamorphosis. It’s a poetics of the cycle as renewal.
The aesthetics of movement take the form of mechanisms transforming forms through repetition, cycles and a non-linear conception of time that flows, repeats, modulates and the traces it leaves behind. It evokes the precarious, the fragile, the mutable and the ephemeral. Time is suspended, but withers away in the ephemerality of installations, often in situ. Space and time communicate on both material and psychic levels. The noise of motorizations and the impossibility of silence in movement raise questions about sound ambiences. My research aims to capture the complexity of systems and the interweaving of living things and machinery at different levels. Mechanisms are also echoes of psychic dynamics. My research is formal, but also deals with language and the images it conjures up.
Parallels and shifts between individual constructions, emotional structures and formal structures are established. Certain morphological characteristics of architecture, particularly religious architecture, as a place of passage, immersion and elevation, are taken up in a move towards interior architecture. The familiar is manifested in furniture elements. The representation of the body is skinless, fragile and naked. It is embodied in various materials and stories. It is present in circulating fluids, like humours, hijacking certain medical images. Sticky, viscous, oozing textures are both attractive and repulsive. Fluids drip, water and overflow. The body is fragmented.