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JEAN-BAPTISTE CARON

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Jean-Baptiste Caron’s works often provide us an ambivalent feeling. Each time the slightest disturbances feed our imagination. We find ourselves evolving in a suspended universe, without even realizing it. This shift comes from games with gravity, immateriality, optics… For instance, concrete balls are trapped in alveoli of transparent spheres; we exhale a little of ourselves without being caught by the mirrors; matter was dug without having been pierced… If the idea of passage is present, it is more a question of evoking circulations here. As we stumble upon the proposed accesses, our gaze and our mind bifurcate to browse the movements intercepted by various matters. By capturing these various movements (suspended, deviated, implied, printed, fixed, etc.) the artist gives us different states to see whether it is about transformation, gravity, balance/imbalance, hardly anything. He gives us the Time to see. We find ourselves experiencing the time that is, that passes or that has passed. Some works do not give any clue as to the feasibility of their condition and then, conversely in others, one can, inferencing, visualize the necessary gestures to produce the form. This time favourable to the realization of the work is here stopped then fixed to the point of impregnating the work of art. Sometimes we are also given to see the time stretching. It is thus dissected down to the smallest details. This is how seconds become millennia, how a sphere never takes flight, how materials liquefy, soften without going on to the next stage. A coring of time unfolds before our eyes. We also have suspended time to the limit of the flickering, making us apprehend the slightest finger snap that can bring everything back in the course of time. If this was the case, falls would have to be considered. While Sisyphus was condemned to eternally roll a rock on a hill which – before reaching the top – goes down each time, Jean-Baptiste Caron suspends for a moment this infernal loop. Leaving us with the fear of a fall or a flight that could happen at any moment. At other times, the artist gives us a brief possibility to see his work in its wholeness. We’re running out of time. We have no proposals to stop it. The work is revealed in an ephemeral as impalpable breath. More recently we discover the shift of time. We can see or hear again what happened right here, right where we are. We are also told that our presence is not without consequences in the scheme of things. The more Jean-Baptiste Caron gives us to see, the more the rules of logic seem to fade away, letting us believe in the mere action of magic. Delete to reveal what is given to see for the best. The artist acts less in a demiurgical gesture than in a revealing act. Finally, he happens to be a Usher offering the viewer the possibility to become active. A revealing usher not without a touch of humour as he plays with Time. He disrupts it, disturbs us to the point where we wonder what is illusion and what is not.

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Leïla Simon.

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