PAR-DESSUS L’ÉPAULE – Vincent Voillat

Galerie Eric Mouchet is pleased to present Vincent Voillat’s new solo exhibition in its Parisian space entitled “Par-dessus l’épaule” (Over the shoulder). This second solo show is the continuation of his reflection on our relationship with the mineral world, pushing formal hypotheses to a troubled zone where the lithic being merges with the forms of the body. The sculptures become suggestive, reducing a little more the frontier that separates the human from the non-living.

The vast scale of mineral time often suggests the apparent contradiction that immobile stone is utterly divorced from the movement of life. To the rock masses belongs eternity, impassivelyblind to the futilities of fleeting beings, to their loves, the things they produce or reproduce, their frenetic quest to inscribe their succession of minutes in a forever that has already begun and become foreclosed. To mere mortals belong the pleasures of inconstancy and interactions, the luxuriant languor of the flesh and the evolving delicacies of creation.
 
Stone obeys the law of hybridity stated by Bruno Latour: none of the objects extending under the human gaze, and all the more so, no object that lends itself to the touch of the human hand, belongs to one single kingdom.
 
In reviving things that appear dead, Vincent Voillat proceeds firstly with an operation of excision.
 
From his childhood, from his wanderings in the depths of legendary forests where rambling and the supernatural employ the language of birds, from the anonymous creaks, torrential lappings and magical rocks, from the indelible wound stifled in its prayer by the concrete and the asphalt of the highways, there returns the power of the agreements and the dissonances between different temporalities.
 
Polished and glued to each other, the stones become symbols of an otherness that plays with the borders between ages, chemistry, and uses. Noble and waste marble, transparent crystals and crumbly micas, polished granites and sedimentary limestones unite, transcend their origins, become the characters as much as the instruments of a study of things that make contact.
 
There is certainly a degree of denaturation in the works of Vincent Voillat, let’s say rather multiple twists, allowing divergent natures to come together, to collaborate, whether this collaboration results in the incarnation of new fetishes or the destruction of their initial materials. Contradicting expectations and established principles, including the modus operandi rooted in the history of sculpture itself, constitutes one of the artist’s devices and even one of his main objectives.
 
Perhaps this is also the main kind of hybridisation in which Vincent Voillat indulges: by remixing the history of art, popular cultures and secular traditions, and by shuffling around their hybrid offspring in the realms of the Beautiful, the artist does indeed contravene the rules of propriety. Above all, he holds up a mirror to the enshrined customs whereby distinct categories are classified and standardized: the movement of life and mineral eternity.
 
Considering together the anchoring of a stone and its becoming another, restoring to a dead body its trajectory in space, in time and in beliefs – conceiving that each block fits into a chain of forces and contingent energies – that certainly is one of the most vital, most transgressive, most revolutionary powers, and it is a power vested in Vincent Voillat.
 
Jean-Christophe Arcos
Extract from « Block-chain. Some reflections on life in the work of Vincent Voillat »
C’est peut-être un peu plus qu’une histoire (d’amour) – It may be a little more than a (love) story Galerie Eric Mouchet, with the support of the CNAP Paris, 2023
 
This exhibition will also be the occasion to unveil the first monographic work dedicated to the artist’s work, C’est peut-être un peu plus qu’une histoire (d’amour) (Maybe it’s a little more than a (love) story). Published by the Galerie Éric Mouchet, with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques, this book brings together the texts and works produced by the artist since 2013. It brings together the writings of a «lithic community» formed by the artist and composed of authors, philosophers, theorists, curators and artists: Jean-Christophe Arcos, Emanuele Coccia, Aurélie Faure, Florian Gaité, Alice Guittard, Cécile Hartmann, Kubra Khademi, Klio Krajewska, Léo Marin, Éric Mouchet, Didier Nectoux, Sasha Pevak, Andy Rankin, Louis-Cyprien Rials, Rebecca Topakian.
 
UPCOMING EVENTS:
 
// Wednesday 12 April from 7.30 to 9pm: Vincent Voillat x Jerk Off
Performance lecture of C’est peut-être un peu plus qu’une histoire (d’amour) by Vincent Voillat with the complicity of Aurélie Faure as part of the Jerk-Off festival.

// Saturday 29 April 2023 from 3pm:
Presentation and signature of the monograph C’est peut-être un peu plus qu’une histoire (d’amour) in the presence of the artist at the Galerie Eric Mouchet.

MORE INFORMATIONS:

// Press kit
// Vincent Voillat
// Par-dessus l’épaule (03/18-04/29/2023)