"Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water!"
[Groucho Marx]

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Claire Trotignon focuses on architecture, on interior / outdoor, on private / public spaces concepts and on the cohabitation between nature and culture. She also focuses on modernist architecture whose essence and forms are based on a utopian philosophy. Technicolor is a series of collages retouched with a pencil, silk screened and enhanced by a watercolour. The series shows images of isolated pools, taken out of their context. As fragments dug in the paper. The deconstructed image loses its sense of scale and is read like a bas relief where the hollow retains the colour.

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The work of Cécile Beau are made of installations where the sound, the image and the object are involved into multiple relationships, sometimes contradictory. The name "Vallen" means "falling" in Dutch. A drop of water seems to fall from the ceiling in a puddle of dark water on the ground. We can randomly hear the noise of the drop followed by the formation of concentric circles on the puddle. Yet on closer look, Vallen is an illusion: the drop is nowhere, there is only the invitation for the viewer to imagine it or lose all markers. This is a hypnotic work to meditate in a evanescent cycle where time is suspended.

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Le tour du monde en instantané (Around the world in an instant) consists of a series of pictures operating an objectification of the landscape of the Earth on a given Axis (Equator, Tropic of Capricorn, etc.). They are each obtained by the fusion of hundreds of screenshots taken all around the earth on each Axis.
This protocol, physically impossible, is here applied to Google Earth, offering images with a pictorial, diaphanous and analogical rendering. This abstractisation by movement applies too to the caption elements of Google Earth, causing the disappearance of variable data such as altitude or geographical position, letting only appear its logo and a ruler without measure and meaning.

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Caroline Delieutraz's work focuses on the circulation of images and how this fluidity impacts our vision of the world.
"The fish" is a screensaver which shows an archetypal landscape affected by strange events. It is made from a calendar picture  found in the street and rephotographed.
The special effects applied to the image come from online free video stocks. The materiality of the image debunk its artificial aspect while keeping its escapist dimension.

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The work "And if Nothing Had Ever Been ..." is in the form of a simple mirror; by touching with his breath, the viewer can see a sentence before it quickly disappears.
This moment offers to us the opportunity to glimpse another dimension, to switch to another place, whether imaginary or introspective.
This technique calls something about the immaterial, shown by the fog exhaled by the breath of each visitor. It's this connection with the breath which interests the artist in this link he has with life, as well as water with the living.

"One day I was on the train to go to a region to the center of France. I watched the landscape out the window: an unknown machine that I did not know was spouting water on a large field. The water came out by interruptions and flew away strongly, in the form of a semicircular arch. It was like the earth was thirsty and was drinking the water by opening her mouth. But strangely, this scene was also very sensual for me. At that time, I had the illusion that the water froze by soaring in the air ... And I carved the image of this moment. "

The works of Geraud Soulhiol are characterized by cartography, landscape and architecture by deploying as many clues for us to enter this heterotopic territory.

Series "- Terre!" evokes distant territories, islands floating in our minds, the sea is invisible around but we can guess it. Scanning the horizon with a telescope from a distant ship, a dreamy architecture emerges, a world parallel to ours, obviously filled with childlike imagery of the artist, fantastic allegories and medieval miniature. Finely Geraud Soulhiol questions the traces left by man on his "scenery of life."

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Due to a research residency in Japan in fall 2013, Claudia Larcher visited Fukushima and Tohoku Regions. The cities Futaba, Rikuzentakata and Ishinomaki were hit worst from the earthquake and following tsunami in March 2011.  Since then two years passed and the cleanup is almost done. But in the most affected areas there are still no buildings newly constructed. On the one hand, because the landholders are missed or dead on the other hand, the bereaved are afraid of another disaster in the near future and moved to the inland.
What is left close to the sea, is a strange utopian vastness with an untouched vegetation. The outlines of the buildings carried away by the tsunami are still visible. Only a few houses are left, to remind us of the past.

"Infiltration" is an answer to the exhibition Still Water. This installation made of damp-proof plasterboards is a wall that goes through the gallery space. The plasterboards have absorbed water during several weeks in a moisty cave. They resurface in the gallery’s space, dry, but finally lined with water. The installation "infiltration" create a dam, a protection, although weakened by the water it contains and surrounds.

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Water is present in the form of ice and snow in the Nature morte series of Laurent Pernot. A nature that will no longer live in the ice, as a prisoner of the time she will also be preserved in eternal youth, unaltered, original. Laurent Pernot's work often evokes abandoned places where the presence of life is very rare, their traces suggest a distant past of legendary kingdoms or fairy tales. The boundaries between reality and myth are blurred forever in a dreamlike atmosphere.

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By stating that water takes shape only within a container, the piece becomes a work on forms and space, on how spaces influence and relate to each other. The coloration of the water, through the absorption of pigments present in pieces of colored paper, the assembly and the composition of glass containers and the disposal of the transparent colored water with its transparence inside them, they are used as syntactic elements to introduce a dimension of similarities and contrasts in relation.

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PRESS RELEASE

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