La logique est dans la bête

La Logique est dans la bête is an exhibition by Isabelle Plat exploring the bestiality nestled at the heart of the human psyche: an intimate, subterranean coexistence that is constitutive of these beings described as ‘civilised’ yet never quite tamed.
 
The starting point for the exhibition is a book published in 1988: “Étoffe. Les surfaces topologiques intrinsèques” by Jean-Michel Vappereau, a mathematician and psychoanalyst. One concept structures the whole: the Borromean knot—three rings that do not touch each other in pairs but which together form an inseparable whole, an image of solidarity without hierarchy or foundation. This structure finds its direct equivalent in Isabelle Plat’s “Psychic Knots”, where human hair and sheep’s wool clump together without beginning or end, without right side or wrong side, until the top and bottom merge.
 
The exhibition thus brings together a collection of sculptures made from hair donated by hairdressing salons. For the past twenty years or so, Isabelle Plat has been working with human hair, a rot-proof, virtually eternal material with powerful symbolic significance. Like a peacock’s feather or a sheep’s fleece, hair is the archetype of the species to which it belongs: a biological signature as much as a distinguishing mark. By choosing these materials, the artist allows the animal aspect to reclaim its rightful place within the material. Attached to anatomical features (hands, feet, lips), the “Psychic Knots” hover on the edge of recognition: the eye identifies them without ever being certain. This shift in perception lies at the heart of the project. Isabelle Plat draws inspiration here from ‘jizz’, a concept borrowed from ornithology. It refers to an intuition that enables even the most seasoned ornithologists to identify a bird, not through direct observation, but by the sound of its wings or the distortion it causes in vegetation as it passes. To see without seeing. To recognise without being able to name.
 
These latent sculptures invite manipulation. They will indeed be handled by contortionists during a performance, unravelling what the exhibition has so far left in a state of suspension. Here, the artist returns to a principle dear to her: that of ‘sculpture for use’, a practice woven between two demands—those of art and those of practical use—without one taking precedence over the other. Isabelle Plat defines functional sculpture as: “a sculpture that one does not merely see with one’s eyes, but also perceives through one’s movements.”
 
 
 
MORE INFORMATION:
 
// Isabelle Plat
// Press release
// La logique est dans la bête (7/11-19/12/26 | Paris)