Narcosis

Lidagat, Clara Rivault (stained glass 176x165x70cm)

Artists : Esther Denis, Luna Duchaufour-Lawrance, Gabrielle Lerch, Clara Rivault, Cléo Totti et les Æthers

Curator : Gabrielle Lerch

In a black, skin-tight, flexible neoprene suit, submerged beneath the ocean's surface at 34.3 metres, something has made time malleable. The abyssal space expands. Under the mask, intoxication tastes of nitrogen.  

Spanning millennia of practice and new media, the exhibition Narcosis features pieces by Esther Denis, Luna Duchaufour-Lawrance, Gabrielle Lerch, Clara Rivault, Cléo Totti, and the Æthers. Body-corals, liquid limbs, ectoplasms and animated objects all bear witness to other timeframes. 

An intangible substance escapes from the interstices of our perception. It shimmers. 

Spectators will have the opportunity to gaze upon the image of Narcissus, whose flesh merges with a cloudy, artificial water. A "double of reality" rising from a mother-of-pearl mirror; 

Examining simulacra of artefacts appealing to the art of sourcery: these objects are simultaneously sensors, roots, and streams, destined for fictitious purposes;  

Peering through a porthole into another dimension where bodies split up, a moving painting of a skin that has reverted to water; 

Circling a portal: a stained-glass window, the ‘bible of the poor’ that recounts the story of the water deity Lidagat and the tears she collected in a pewter basin; 

Looking at a twisted body of ash, which seems frozen by lava. A column concurrently architectural and vertebral; 

And, finally, marvelling at the lips quivering in the photographs of psychic women, rekindling the accounts of seances. 

If water carries memory, it's one that artists transcribe, delving into the archives, legends, and myths that permeate our civilisations. Water, which is indispensable to the emergence and survival of species, provides the history of bodies in their various states: icy, liquid, vaporous and trickling. 

Narcosis invites visitors to an obscure territory where the living and the inert, the occult, and the light all coexist. Here, the tangible object comes up against its own reflections and shadows. 

The works unfurl, responding to one another, materialising the flows and experiences that distort our relationship with reality. These visions are like ghosts, phantasms: they evaporate as soon as the exhibition closes. 

Text: Gabrielle Lerch