Vincent Mauger, L’œil de l’ilinx, by Alexis Jakubowicz

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Vincent Mauger's work is usually approached from the perspective of form or material. The artist is a surveyor, topographer, and geometer, a genius of volume. It goes without saying that his presence in an architecture school is a truism. To be convinced of this, you need only to read Bénédicte Ramade's analysis of his Vasarian use of rules, order, and measurement. But “beyond this practical geometry, the rest is nothing more than speculative geometry, which has its games, its uselessness, and, so to speak, its novels, like other sciences.” [1]"

Vincent Mauger proves Chateaubriand 's words true. His works are more than just calibrated objects. The designs he creates using 3D software or graph paper take on a subjective dimension in physical space , which is linked not so much to their creation as to their reception. “The project takes first place over the object”: this confession is made without any conceptual ulterior motive. The artist is not experimenting with a disinvested sculpture, as Charlotte Posenenske did with her D and DW series in 1967. Even less is it a question of filling the absence of a work with its plan, as Bernar Venet did when he exhibited the diagram of a minimalist tube at the Céret Museum in 1966. No, the volumes of the Rennes artist are eminently physical and imbued with a strong identity. The primacy is not that of the idea over the work, but rather of the gesture over the result. His sculptures have a vast processual dimension and, conversely, a moderate exhibition value. Once completed, they are reasonable obstacles, walls against which the viewer's gaze bounces. The agglomerated material ensembles are puzzles that everyone can try to solve with their minds. Faced with piles of bricks, cinder blocks, plastic sheaths, and tubes, the eye is active. We identify, we qualify, we quantify to solve the mystery of the mass. In sum, despite their size, Vincent Mauger's works are manipulable, or at least practicable. They require the audience to have a certain capacity for abstraction in order to return the object to its project, to redesign it. In their presence, we develop an empathy that traditional categories of sculpture analysis obscure.

The transfer of interest between form and its audience involves more than just a sculptural noema. Aesthetics are not closed in on themselves, but possess a highly playful quotient. The floor space of La Maréchalerie is a puzzle. Roger Caillois' typology of games seems more appropriate than an expected commentary on in situ or post-Greenbergism to describe the audience's experience. Super Asymmetry can be defined in the sociologist's terms as a free, separate, uncertain, unproductive, regulated, and fictional practice[2].

1. First, the viewer's freedom determines the nature of the work: not only can the visitor walk on the stage, but they can also move around on it. This mobility ensures that the volume itself is active, that it is not an object around which one revolves but an area that one enters.
2.    The movements take place in a separate domain: the visitor's experience is like a game, “circumscribed within precise, predetermined limits of space and time”; in this case, the Maréchalerie art center in Versailles from September 15 to December 15, 2012, during opening hours.
3. Despite its framework, the practice is uncertain: the course of each visit cannot be determined. “A certain amount of latitude [is] necessarily left to the initiative of the [viewer].” Within the given limits, everyone is free to modulate their experience. Some may remain motionless for a few seconds at the entrance to the room, others may spend an entire day counting the cells. Here, freedom is increased by chance.
4. In Roger Caillois's words, the experience of play must be unproductive: it creates “neither good, nor wealth, nor anything new of any kind” and results in “a situation identical to that at the beginning.” It is certain that the principle of free admission leads to unproductivity; it is equally certain that at the end of the exhibition, the art center will return to its initial state.
5.    The practice is regulated: we do not refer to the qualities of the work but to the use that the institution allows us to make of it. For the Super Asymmetry exercise, “new legislation” is temporarily introduced. Spaces that are usually open to the public are made unreachable by an emergency law.
6. Finally, the experience of the work is like that of a game, “accompanied by a specific awareness of a second reality or of complete unreality in relation to everyday life.” Each visitor can create a story to support their perception.
 
Vincent Mauger's motivation is therefore not effective action on reality but the free expression of instinctive tendencies. In his case, we might say that “artistic consciousness seems to achieve a tormented and qualitatively unique balance between introverted, playful, spectacular tendencies and a taste for achievement[3].” But the effort to define this leads to the same conclusion as that reached by the esteemed Roger Caillois. “These various qualities are purely formal. They do not prejudge the content [of the game].” In short, we have identified six criteria that structure the experience, but we have not described it. However, the sociologist has strived not only to develop general principles of play, but also to divide all games into four categories according to their purpose. He named them agôn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx[4], respectively. The first covers all competitive activities, the second those based on chance or betting. The third and fourth cover simulation and vertigo, respectively.

Here, the simulacrum is linked to the narrative potential of the proposal. The brick floor can be perceived as a backdrop and the crater as a “pretense” of its collapse. Within this space, visitors can act out whatever performance they wish. It must be acknowledged, however, that the principle of freedom clashes with the conventions of cultural practice and that, in this sense, it is not so much a question of mimicry.

What remains is ilinx, “the Greek word for whirlpool, from which the word for vertigo (ilingos) is derived in the same language[5].” Roger Caillois describes it as the act of playing “at provoking in oneself, through rapid rotation or falling, an organic state of confusion and disarray.”

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[1] François-Renée de Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, Partie III, Chapitre II, Livre 1, (1802) Paris. Consulté sur WikiSource, la bibliothèque libre le 29 juillet 2012.

[2] Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, Paris, (1958), Paris, Editions Gallimard, Folio Essai, 2006, pp. 42-43.

[3] Emmanuel MOUNIER, Traité du caractère, (1946), Paris, Seuil, p.392.

[4] Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, Paris, (1958), Paris, Editions Gallimard, Folio Essai, 2006, p.47.

[5] Ibid. p. 71

[6] Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, Paris, (1958), Paris, Editions Gallimard, Folio Essai, 2006, p.68.
 

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Sans titre, by Bénédicte Ramade

 

A volcanic rock, an axonometric section, a topographical view, a coral aggregate, a sponge, a primitive hybrid, or even a mechanical prototype: the situations in which Vincent Mauger confronts us constantly play on this in-between space. A transitional state between ruin and expanding construction, dynamic yet indeterminate: this is the paradoxical nature of this young artist's work. And no sleight of hand, please. WYSIWYG[1]. However, the matter is less simple than it seems.

Vincent Mauger is allergic to the mannerism of the mille-feuille of quotations that plague postmodern art. Uninterested in revelling in the overused vocabulary of American minimalists, he prefers the English sculpture of Richard Deacon[2] and stubbornly cultivates a scholarly intuition for spaces, materials and mediums. He borrows them from construction—bricks, cinder blocks, plastic sheathing, PVC pipes, etc.—and moves with equal ease from computer drawing to structural work, from sculpture to video. From the twisting of these common materials, Vincent Mauger draws a transitive and heterogeneous practice that is not very talkative but deeply empathetic. But how can this universe be organized? The Tuscan artist Giorgio Vasari, in The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, written between 1550 and 1568[3], offers a pertinent argument: "Proceeding from the intellect, drawing, the father of our three arts—architecture, sculpture, and painting—elaborates a global concept from multiple elements. This is like the form or idea of all objects in nature, always original in its measurements. Whether it be the human body or animals, plants or buildings, sculpture or painting, we grasp the relationship of the whole to the parts, of the parts to each other and to the whole. From this understanding, a concept is formed, a reason generated in the mind by the object, whose manual expression is called drawing. Drawing is therefore the tangible expression, the explicit formulation of a notion that is internal to the mind or mentally imagined by others and developed into an idea. For Vincent Mauger, drawing is a fundamental and omniscient foundation that perfectly echoes the words of aesthetician Jacqueline Lichtenstein: “For Vasari, all visual arts—architecture, sculpture, painting—stem from drawing. Playing on the double meaning of the word disegno, which means both design and outline, the project and the manual execution of the line, Vasari defines drawing according to two aspects, theoretical and practical[4].” Whether filming, weaving volumes, delineating territories, or exploring perspectives, Mauger participates in this ethical approach to drawing. His open forms cultivate a hypothetical appearance that is deeply processual. And because all or almost all of his works bear the gentle, elliptical name Untitled, out of a desire not to impose anything on the viewer, not to constrain them to a single way of thinking, we must apply our own system of “organization” to this heterogeneous universe. And once again borrow from Vasari the rule, order, and measure with which he defines drawing.

The rule would define the rigor of the arrangement of invasive works adapted to distinctive architectures, from the Chapelle des Calvairiennes in Mayenne (2005) to the Brasserie Bouchoule in Montreuil (2008). They are unique in that they are composed of a single material—brick and concrete block—creating a uniform covering that is adjusted to the ground of the site. The modularity of the materials acts as a grid, de-realizing the exhibition spaces and transforming them into vectorized landscapes. The arrangement of these “penetrable” structures, controlled by their disorder, creates a visual experience and perspective that escapes the habitual use of materials. Mauger likes to thwart expectations and customs. The floor-base allows for growth, with reliefs and “pebbles” acting as three-dimensional “pop-ups” and threatening the original minimalism. From logos to topos, from remarkable places to abstract topography made up of contour lines, these very simple materials manage to transform a unique place into a modeled container. Recently, the ceiling of the Galerie du Dourven was invaded (Château Millésime, 2010) by brick-colored polystyrene bottle racks. The surface, as if hailed by the rigorous orthogonality of the material's factory production, is then contradicted by the eruptive and corroded effect of imitation stalactites. A new tension, a subtle disruption, similar to the installation created from black and white checkered vinyl flooring at the Château de Chamarande in 2011. The disciplined covering then takes over part of the room, rising up and breaking free from the system to create an area of disorder. This way of disorienting materials, their properties, and the framework given to them was foreshadowed in a graceful drawing mimicking the comforting regularity of sheets of graph paper with so-called Seyes stripes, with the meticulousness of graph paper brutally countered by the entanglement of lines.

In these installations, which comply with the rules, Mauger creates a singular collision between the reality of the space and the effect of representation, giving the impression of walking through an illusion. By doggedly cultivating transience in his sculptural and environmental forms, in his drawings and videos, Mauger maintains ambiguity and conveys a deeply graphic mental space. He explores the barely visible gap between manual and physical construction (4,500 cinder blocks, 205 m² of bricks, kilos of compressed paper) and the cold impression of digital faceting, the modesty of the materials and their ultra-precise resolution. It is even more surprising to note how, beyond this facade of autonomy and the reticence conveyed by the titles “Sans” (Without), these works ‘address’ the visitor, a quality that persists in the second “category,” that of measurement.

When Mauger sets out to explore space using points of balance and rupture, he manages to tension an entire architecture with just a few straps and stretchers. His favorite motif (though not exclusively) is the spider's web, a natural, empirical construction of high resolution, a form closely linked to line. From the courtyard of the Eclusière house in Toulouse (2007) to the white room of the Maison de la Culture in Nevers and Nièvre (2007), via the Interface apartment in Dijon (2007, Elastic Mountain), the tension creates a design and configures the space to play with its flatness, surfaces, and angles. Folding/unfolding, composition/decomposition, the disarming simplicity of domestic materials once again rivals technicality. The balance achieved in the shaggy diagram of Elastic Mountain by the tension of 120 meters of electric blue tensioners generates a point of gravity between prowess and threat. More autonomous, Untitled (2004), created from a sheet of plywood cut into a continuous concentric strip and shaped using a single clamp, operates on the register of this demystified virtuosity. Such a sculptural gesture violently contrasts the fullness and fluidity of the line drawn with fluidity and immediately contradicted by the rigidity of the wood. Mauger works with the resistance caused by a simple twist held in place with stark simplicity by an almost derisory clamping tool. More recently, steel chains and aluminum rods have been suspended in a severe knot in the middle of the space, simply connected to the picture rails by three hanging points (2008, Rezé). These 120 linear meters provided a measure of space and focused it on its nodal point, a point of connection and strength that reorganized the priorities of movement. This supple and hard mass confidently but without authoritarianism compelled the visitor to measure themselves against relationships of masses, volumes, projected shadows, and vanishing lines. Within the composition, the off-center architecture constantly replayed its own balance, as in the work created for the Zervos Prize (2010), a contradictory alloy of quilts, anchors, and steel chains.

As an initial synthesis of measurement and rule, The Undercroft (2008, Brighton) recently combined the suspension of a wooden lattice landscape supported by tall pillars in the middle of a church nave. The honeycomb structure became a penetrable trellis, a floating landscape of prosaic contour lines; between poetry and squaring, Mauger's empiricism delights in maintaining structures in perpetual flux. An even more expansive version was created at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, with 1,000 square meters of wood floating at eye level, a horizon line from which reliefs and uneven surfaces emerged. The framework of a landscape, the support for speculation left to the discretion of the visitor-surveyor taking the measure of a regulated but chaotic space, of decisive but empirical growth. Two years later, Vincent Mauger gave another form to the hybridization of rules and measurements in Lozère by placing balls of bottle crates on straps under the ridge of a roof. The material invariably reminiscent of cinder blocks, even though it is made of polystyrene, the precarious balancing system was reinforced by the impression of mass, heightening the tense impermanence.

But where speculative forms renew the viewer's forms and criteria of evaluation is in the last category of the order, that of autonomous sculptures. Bright blue and red plastic sheaths, gray PVC pipes, bright yellow tubing, dark gray polystyrene sheaths, articulated melamine panels, metal shelves—the construction sets generated by these expanding materials hesitate between contagious randomness and a subtle balancing act. The bluish “puddle” produced in 2008 at the Frac des Pays-de-la-Loire spreads out, biomorphic and territorial, in a strange anamorphosis floating above the ground, like the synthesis of a regular floor and a measured space. Appearing like a hologram, its vibrating colors de-realize the object, shifting it into the realm of representation. These plumbing pipes, simply glued together, initiate a possible mental space—space, surface, unstable fluid, island—that is polymorphic. The logic that governs the distribution of the modules remains unclear, as does the decision that stops the aggregation process at a given moment. The form remains doubly suspended, as when shelves are pegged together (2010), the sculpture seems to be in a temporary state, ready for further expansion, to pursue its own logic. It even flirts with menace when these sculptures reach monumental scale. And there, the domestic and familiar material becomes offensive, as if driven by a demand for autonomy. The Dictator's Theorem (2009, Le vent des forêts) says no less. A shaggy ball of wooden stakes with a considerable diameter of five meters, the work imposes itself in a paradoxical balance between the complex closed system of its design and its archaic appearance. Defensive to be sure, it literally pushes the viewer into a corner by dominating them with confidence. In the Tuileries Garden in 2011, a distant relative of this first system spread its six meters in diameter in gnawed planks with the same superiority. Between imperious beginnings and fragile degeneration.

Vincent Mauger takes advantage of the vagueness of Untitled to display his projects, ideas, and drawings as Vasari intended, combining outline and conception, theory and practice in the same gesture. His forms are undoubtedly ambivalent, structuring, and destabilizing. So, a simple angle diagram tracing Cartesian coordinates from the Y-coordinate and X-coordinate based on the reference line (Z) could perfectly describe Vincent Mauger's work: rational, but entirely relative.

[1] Acronym for What you see is what you get as claimed by the promise to implement the eponymous software.
[2] In an interview with Lili Reynaud-Dewar, in Espaces supposés, exhibition catalog, Musée Denys Puech, Rodez, 2006.
[3] From La peinture, edited by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Paris, Larousse, 1995, p.524.
[4] id, ibid, p.524.
[5] "The rule in architecture was to measure ancient monuments and preserve their designs in modern works. The order was to separate the “styles” so that each building would have its own members without mixing Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Tuscan. The general rule in architecture and sculpture was to represent bodies accurately, upright, and with harmoniously organized members; the same applied to painting." Id., ibid., p. 664.

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Spatialisation de la sculpture, by Valérie Da Costa

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Vincent Mauger is a sculptor. He belongs to a young generation of artists (Stéphanie Cherpin, Laurent Le Deunff, Katinka Bock, Guillaume Leblon, Morgane Tschiember, etc.) who favor an art of technè, or “making,” far removed from the aesthetics of the ready-made and creative distancing or delegation, considering that sculpture is above all a matter of confrontation with matter and therefore with volume. But also to those who are interested in the principles of construction related to architecture (Tobias Putrih, Jeppe Hein).
Since his first works in the early 2000s, Vincent Mauger has developed a body of work in which there is an extreme tension between the use of digital technologies and the use of basic materials (wood, concrete blocks, polystyrene, bricks, PVC pipes, etc.), which, under the artist's tools, become surfaces, floors, landscapes, and rocks.

Often, these works appear to be three-dimensional cartographies that seem to emerge from generic drawings generated by computer programs, as if they were transcribing what the artist calls “the mental perception of a space or an object.” However, these generic forms have the particularity of revealing constructed shapes that bear witness to the actions that the artist has subjected the material to. But what is disturbing about their confrontation is that, although entirely handmade, they resemble manufactured products aesthetically. It is no coincidence that Vincent Mauger has chosen to name each of his interventions “untitled,” which gives his work a conceptual sense of globality and homogeneity.

 

Vincent Mauger cuts, folds, crumples, burns, glues, screws. These actions play with and subvert the properties of materials, as in this sculpture made of burnt melamine (Untitled, 2010), which appears to be a giant residue of a sharpened pencil, on which the traces of the arrangement of irregularly shaped wooden panels and the burns on the material are visible.

One could say that the artist pursues a form of art process in his own way, but by giving it a more interventionist character, leading him to conceive a more elaborate form by exploiting the intrinsic qualities of the material, something that the post-minimalist works of Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Barry Le Va refused to do in their more direct and raw relationship with the material. Instead, he positions himself as the heir to this contradictory but more aesthetic relationship with the material that entirely occupies Richard Deacon's sculpture, in which the processes of transforming the material are laid bare, revealing, for example, lines of wood twisted or folded back on themselves in a language essentially focused on organic forms.

However, Vincent Mauger's work is less about biomorphism than mathematical or biological models (particularly the representation of viruses) transformed into sculpture, especially on a large scale, such as this sphere measuring three meters thirty in diameter made from cut-up pallets (Untitled, 2011) or the one measuring no less than five meters, bristling with wooden spikes (Le théorème des dictateurs, Le Vent des forêts, 2009), which is part of the beautiful Vent des forêts forest trail in the Meuse region.
For him, space manifests itself as a state of concentration or expansion of matter through either closed forms (wooden or metal spheres) or open forms (polystyrene floors (Untitled, 2008) that spread out horizontally or sculptures made of thin plywood sheets (Untitled, 2008) that wrap around a pillar like a ribbon).

If sculpture is first and foremost a matter of mass, weight, gravity, volume, and spatialization of form that takes into account the surrounding space by integrating it into the very creation of the work, then Vincent Mauger responds to the inherent foundations of this art. He designs autonomous forms that are placed in space, on the ground, but not only there, as they are sometimes also suspended in mid-air, thus blurring our reference points in terms of our perception of the work and its possible weight.

Some of his other works are more closely related to the principle of installation art, which, as we know, from Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau to Allan Kaprow's environments, has its origins in sculpture.
Each of them is designed to suit the location that hosts them, adjusting to their surroundings and inviting visitors to wander around, sometimes with difficulty, on a floor covered with concrete blocks (Untitled, Instants Chavirés, Montreuil, 2008) or bricks (Untitled, 2005, Chapelle des Calvairiennes in Mayenne). In other cases, the artist also saturates the height, as in his proposal (Untitled, 2006, Chapelle du Bélian in Mons) for this former chapel in Belgium, where he designed an environment made of balls of crumpled paper in which visitors, invited to wander, sink into the white mass.
The work becomes a field of tactile experiences that consist of treading on and touching the material. Sometimes, close to architecture, it draws and materializes space, as in the proposal for a disjointed volume which, on the scale of the Lieu Unique (Untitled, Estuaire, Nantes, 2009), forces visitors to contort themselves if they want to traverse its different heights.

All of these works make us aware of the spatialization of sculpture and are part of the legacy of the many perceptual proposals of the 1960s, notably those of kinetic art and arte povera or their extensions, such as Getulio Alviani's Rilievo a riflessione ortogonale (Relief à réflexion orthogonale) (1967) by Getulio Alviani, inviting visitors to walk on a floor of irregular steel plates, or Fabio Mauri's della Luna (1968), offering a space saturated with polystyrene balls to venture into.
But what is surprising about Vincent Mauger's interventions is their titanic scale. For the artist, tools in hand, confronts the material alone and sculpts the space.
The short videos that accompany his work can be read as a summary of his research on the material. Like the one that shows, in real time (Untitled, 2010, 2 min 48 sec), the artist cutting the table on which he is standing with a chainsaw, or the one that records the time it takes for a ball of paper to burn completely (Untitled, 2010, 6 min 21 sec).
Their simplicity and deliberate formal poverty function as an image bank in relation to his sculpture. However, they do not illustrate it, but rather bear witness, however modestly, to a gesture.

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His work is far from humorless. And, when he was invited to create a carte blanche for Mouvement magazine in 2009, Vincent Mauger chose to show himself, cigarette lit in his mouth, immersed in the thick paper balls that filled the Bélian chapel! His body of work also includes a small print that reproduces Man Ray's famous 1919 photograph of Marcel Duchamp's tonsure. The only difference is that instead of the star, Vincent Mauger has drawn a circled A, the symbol of anarchy. It is as if, through this choice, he has adopted Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's motto, which illustrates the form he seeks in his work: “The highest perfection of society lies in the union of order and anarchy.”

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ESSAIS D’ESPACES, by Célia Charvet

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Concrete space has been extracted from things. They are not in it. It is in them.  

Henri Bergson

 

Measuring spaces. Taking into account that all space is subject to measurement by bodies, objects, movements—by matter. Realizing that the orientation of these bodies, objects, and movements produces figures, and that these figures transform as soon as a gap appears. The distance between things, however small, is the spacing that brings the place into being. Without it, space is devoid of identity. It is merely a potential receptacle. A quantifiable measurement.
It is in the spacings that angles and edges, curves, reliefs, folds, and voids themselves nestle. Everything that constitutes the matter of living or inert things—matter that structures the air. 
Both measurable and measuring, they settle into space at the same time as they create it. They bring out its form—and its quality.
It is the alternation between solids and intervals that creates form—against a backdrop of available space. Substances can thus rub against each other, evaluate each other, resist each other. Creating atmospheres.
These bodies and spaces are inextricably linked, defining each other, sharing their influences, coexisting without absorbing each other, forms against forms, and also proposing pictorial forms—crystallizations of more or less fleeting relationships. Perpetual acts of measurement. This is the basis of Vincent Mauger's approach.

 

His entire work - drawings, sculptures, installations, videos - is marked by these issues of connecting substances. It is entirely driven by the ability to reproduce in concrete or virtual forms elements derived from experience - images, emotions, perceptions - which, in existence, are hidden from view. How can we give substance to feelings? How can we bring to light what connects, links, and relates things?

 

In this epiphanic work, bringing things into being is most often approached abstractly, structurally in any case, without the gesture, though omnipresent, ever informing a state, a mood, or a way of being. Constructing forms from multiple materials, inscribing them in two or three dimensions, composing their relationships—these are fundamental practices that energize each of his pieces. Passed through the filter of reappropriation and manipulation of the material, reality, thus integrated and altered, becomes a new real element. If the work process tends to disfigure it through simplification, unevenness, or changes in scale, it is precisely to achieve the distanced, shifted perspective necessary for its comprehension. This is also necessary for determining its nature and status. Vincent Mauger's materialism aims only to better convey what cannot be touched—the situation.

 

In Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky, three characters traverse The Zone, a forbidden and sacred place, to reach an ultimate point—The Room—a place of contemplation for one's deepest desires. Each step of the journey and each shot of the film presents a precise positioning of objects and individuals. It is this positioning itself, in its extreme composition, that not only makes the place mysterious, but also connects the characters, places them in a shared story, and organizes their confrontation—the place thus becomes the fourth character, whose role is to bind them together. This binding reveals the power of symbolic space over behavior.
This scenographic aspect is mentioned here because it echoes the way in which the artist establishes situations rather than setups in his work—works of context rather than pieces to be exhibited.
 

Space is always approached with a sense of distance that allows the elements to be considered in relation to one another. For him, occupying or invading a volume or surface is not about replacing one place with another, nor is it about viewing it solely as a setting for display. It is about orienting it. And allowing the eye and the body to experience a passage—in front of, around, or inside—and to visualize its stages. Shortly before reaching their destination, the three men in Stalker enter a vast room whose floor is covered with small dunes. These sand hills will be the setting for a scene marked by extreme tension. The physical and ideological distance is translated and exacerbated here by the material and unreal dimension of these undulations. The landscape thus drawn, in the rhythm of the mounds and hollows, accentuates the distance, injects a degree of infinity into the horizon, and forces a slower, more circuitous movement. Space, but also time, are thus doubled. And each is measured against the other.

 

Cutting up space, breaking it down and then reassembling it to form a new context. Multiplying axes, reference points, angles of view. Fitting empty spaces into full ones to characterize intervals. All these actions bring the artist's works closer to the scene described. In addition to a strong visual similarity that can be seen in several pieces, what they have in common here is the ability to determine and complicate the differences—adding material to create rhythm, reproducing shapes to increase the feeling of movement, filling in the spaces in between to better adjust the postures. Showing how the situation changes with the setting and how the relationships between all the elements are disrupted.
Hill-forms, whether drawn, sculpted, or designed by computer, are the result of modifying a flat surface. Twisting, lifting, detaching, and crumpling are all gestures and movements that involve the artificial formation of sinuous or rugged curves, random or controlled, and which trigger the creation of landscapes—archetypal landscapes, of all times and places, reminding the viewer of their own physical and mental journeys. What we are offered is a geometric journey through the geography of mountains. A reinvented geography that can be discovered and experienced on different scales and different media.

 

Multiple scales, diverse media, plural approaches. Vincent Mauger does not merely experiment with materials and mediums. He brings them together. Sometimes within the same space, provoking mise en abîmes and reciprocal evaluations—spaces within spaces. Thus, the models of a given space, presented within its walls, require a continual readjustment of the gaze and the body. Avoiding faithful reproduction—often disoriented, dented, or even reproduced in multiple copies—they define a back-and-forth between original and copy, architecture and sculpture, container and content. This logic of interlocking is anything but boxed in. In the relationships that are established, definitions are blurred. The content is also containing. The notions of interior and exterior are difficult to distinguish. The ephemeral or fragile coexists with stability, without us always knowing exactly what is truly stable or fragile. Architecture itself is called into question—could it become a giant sculpture? Finally, what place is there for the body, that standard measure that usually moves at the right distance? Alternately dominated and dominant, small and large, unable to fix in its memory the contours of an object whose presence is always linked to what surrounds it, it becomes the witness of its own experience. A doubling of space, then, and a splitting of a body immersed in the laws of relativity.

 

The artist works with edges. He places and shifts boundaries so that the finitude of a space or a room seems to conceal a universe in the making, a world unto itself, indeterminate and infinitely extendable, at least in the imagination. Each frame is tested for its potential to contain variations. Each volume, constructed from basic materials, appears in a fragmentary mode. The unity of each piece—whether a space, a sculptural object, or a framed surface—can always be broken down, revealing the logic of assembly, stacking, movement, cutting, or juxtaposition. Fragments-monads but also fragments-worlds, his works contain and produce the possibilities of perceiving, circulating, comparing, projecting, and projecting oneself. In short, of trying one's hand at reality.

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Vincent Mauger, Mesures et dé-mesures de l’espace, by Marie-Ange Brayer

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Crumpled sheets of paper suggesting rocks; plywood “rocks” fallen like meteorites in a park in Issoudun—Vincent Mauger's work plays on the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intelligible. Space is scrutinized in all its dimensions, both physical and virtual.

For Mauger, space is a “cosa mentale,” as in the Renaissance, except that here the instruments of geometry are no longer able to restore an infallible order of representation. During the Monflanquin residency workshops in 2004, Vincent Mauger deconstructs space as much as he constructs it using hypothetical measuring instruments: here, cardboard models create a mise en abyme of the place in which they are located, presenting themselves as their own fictionalization, projecting nothing more than the ghostly nature of their status as representations. Similarly, in “Configuration requise” at the Chapelle des Calvairiennes (Le Kiosque/Mayenne, 2005), Vincent Mauger's brick installation, covering the entire floor of the church, is both a geological thickness and an earthen architecture, sketching out a random topography where the boundaries between digital modeling and physical landscape are rendered indistinguishable.

 

This undecidable dimension between reality and its representation feeds most of this artist's work, which draws on digital tools to develop new ways of presenting objects, transferring them from the digital world to the material world. Nothing delights Vincent Mauger more than drawing abstract lines on a sheet of graph paper, which suddenly escapes this order of measurement to form capricious curves and anachronistic unevenness on a terrain that is no longer quite that of abstraction, nor quite that of representation.

This perpetual oscillation between the physical and virtual worlds inhabits his projects created during his residency in Issoudun and presented in early 2006 in an exhibition entitled “Instant de dispersion” (Moment of Dispersion), which was held in three locations: the studio, the park, and the Hospice St. Roch museum. An almost musical variation had taken over the rooms in each of these locations.

 

In the studio, a video was projected onto the window façade in which, as evening fell, we witnessed the dissolution of giant aspirin tablets in water. The evidence of this video propelled us into the elementary laws of physics as well as into the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and dissolution in dreams. This video also contains the “image in the carpet” of Vincent Mauger's work, which never stops at form, but constantly questions its principles of legitimization, which have always been based on illusionist beliefs, ever since the projections of shadows in Plato's cave. At the same time, Vincent Mauger's works project us into an ironic representation of “nature,” here waterfalls, aquatic bursts that seem to spring from mountainous landscapes, through the fall of stamps into a liquid universe, which gradually disappear to return to an original nothingness.

 

Thus, in Vincent Mauger's work, the end takes us back to the beginning, and so on; loops unravel and re-form indefinitely in concentric paths. The same is true of the “rock” stranded in Issoudun Park, a faceted geometric object, the result of digital modeling, created in sculptural form from plywood. Its anthropomorphic scale physically challenges viewers, who find themselves confronted with a strange object, too large to be a model, too small to be architecture, too schematic to be read as a “sculpture,” which may be nothing more than a “pro-type,” a kind of archaeological object unearthed from ancient modes of representation. The status of this piece thus remains undecidable. It is simply the translation of a process that has crystallized, “a moment of dispersion,” momentarily opting for a form that is both abstract and organic.

 

Having integrated this principle, we are better able to understand Vincent Mauger's works as deliberate uncertainties regarding the fields that share our perception of the world and whose boundaries we are constantly drawing, between what belongs to the mind and what belongs to the physical world. Mauger sets out to open a breach between the two in order to effect semantic transfers and conceptual escapes... at the end of which we are left with only the intangible, the effervescence of tablets that dissolve all form, the flow of curtains of sand in videos that bury the visible order. However, beneath these natural processes and physical determinations, there always remains a “design” that refers to an invisible and abstract order.

 

A similar ambivalence prevailed in the installation of several “spider webs” in the park, made of metal cables. The natural secretion of spider webs results in a highly abstract and complex form. Vincent Mauger enlarges them disproportionately here, about 50 times their usual size, to ensnare us in a perception that is rooted in reality only to better tip us into fiction. Disproportionate, the spider web diminishes us, as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels did; it projects us beyond the mirror of their appearance, as in Lewis Carroll's work; it presents us with a boundary, but one where inside and outside, within and without, are permeable and interchangeable. At the same time, the spider's web is a topography, a map, but a map driven by organic life, which constantly transforms it and reminds us of what our city maps should be: mutable organisms, constantly reconfiguring themselves through our own practices, our incisions, our crossings. The field of physical reality should be able to give itself over to the fluidities and fluctuations of the mental, conceptual, and digital fields.

 

This is why, in Vincent Mauger's work, one always finds its way into the other; it presents itself as a reversible process, as in this 2002 installation, which jointly presents a video in which a sheet of paper is endlessly folded and unfolded, forming escarpments and rocks that then disappear, and a “sculpture,” a geometric shape made of plywood, the crystallization of a formal moment, a random suspension of a process of creation that is both manual and digital.

 

These incessant back-and-forths, where the informal lurks at the heart of mathematical thought, where the most abstract ultimately proves to be the most organic, as in spider webs, thus manage to shake our bearings, shift our patterns of perception, leading us to conceptual realms that seem domesticated while remaining wild and untamed, as evidenced by the variation of works inside the Hospice St. Roch museum, where the video of aspirin sat alongside medieval pharmacopoeia, and where fine webs were mischievously woven in the corners. Vincent Mauger's pieces could thus stand, without any loss of meaning, on the “minor” mode of variation, since they are never more than a notation in the physical universe, on the edge of the weightlessness of the imaginary world, transforming the visible order of things into “mapping,” a subtle cartography of the virtual universe, a crumpling of paradigms or a fragile concretion of paper rocks.

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Pliage Ultra technique, by Eva Prouteau

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Vincent Mauger's works develop parallel logics. Studies related to space, volume, and architecture, they take the form of in situ installations, autonomous sculptural objects, graphic displays, or video projections. They all share the ability to oscillate between several references, between several issues of representation.
One of the challenges of this work lies precisely between the materialization and dematerialization of the object. When Vincent Mauger covers two metal toys with a crust of salt, he seeks to force their structure to appear. Oxidation marks permeate the surface of the device, revealing the object and metaphorically organizing its escape, the revelation of its internal laws. Paradoxically, they are the very mark of its disappearance.

More recently, Vincent Mauger has been constantly shifting between voluminous constructions (enjoying exploring materials, tackling sometimes monumental projects) and virtual lightness. In the digital effusions of our contemporary era, he reintroduces playfulness, combining a more primitive dimension and a more artisanal imagination with the sophistication of 3D software.  The installation Untitled 2007, presented in 2008 at the LH gallery, confirms this power of hybridization: supple lines sculpt the honeycomb surface of vertically assembled PVC tubes, and this ensemble instantly conjures up its modeled double, its virtual representation. The construction system (based on multiplication and proliferation) allows the piece to be mentally extended, its extensions imagined far beyond the exhibition space, in a dynamic of expansion and invasion.

This movement between handmade objects and computer-designed forms can be seen in the artist's drawings: "In all my graphic work, I strive to create confusion between the use of digital and traditional techniques. My goal is not to outdo the technical possibilities offered by computer tools. It is to construct a critical relationship with these tools, to maintain a distance in the discomfort created by the difficulty of distinguishing between them. Indeed, these two worlds merge, complement, and overlap in each of these productions." In the series of drawings Untitled 2006, this results in scribbles on paper with a texture similar to coloring, velvety sketches, fragile expanses of landscape that are nevertheless too perfect. For accidents, tremors, and other irregularities are subtly retouched here by the digital tool, which analyzes the line without dehumanizing it. And we can sense the artist's amusement at these strange balances, these games of “faceting” reality that manage to abstract and embody in the same movement.

Some installations move further away from references to vectorization software. The images they conjure up remain ambiguous: for example, this paper landscape where mountainous relief meets the surface of the sea, fragmented to infinity (Untitled 2006, in situ installation at the Chapelle du Bélian, where Vincent Mauger fills the space with A3 sheets crumpled into balls); or these improbable retro-futuristic machines for traveling through time and accelerating space (Gravity is Dead, where a spiral staircase is tautologically embedded in a complex rotating device; Hardrocking Chair Extreme, where a mutant rocking chair can perform a 360° revolution).
Often disrupting scales and uses, Vincent Mauger's sculptural objects thus leave in their wake multiple avenues of interpretation. These are spaces that can be mentally inhabited, offered to the visitor like dreams suspended in time.

 

For the Frac des Pays de la Loire, Vincent Mauger has designed an exhibition in which all the pieces “play” on the floor. A corner installation (an orthonormal reference point, as found in all 3D software to locate the modeled shape) clearly affirms the desire to virtualize the exhibition space and to transport visitors into a system of representation on an almost excessive scale.

 

Close to these gently unsettling coordinates, a surface catches the eye with its electric colors. Undulating, it rests lightly on the ground, as if floating. In this empirical construction, created without any prior plans or models, Vincent Mauger experiments with the pleasure of a simple compositional principle. The basic module (the PVC sheath traditionally used in plumbing) is used here as a kind of brick, a Lego block. It remains highly recognizable, undergoing no transformations other than being cut into sections and glued together. This basic, completely artisanal assembly nevertheless flirts with the idea that “the whole looks digital,” thus taking on the quality of a hybrid virtual surface, a fragment of landscape, an effervescent agglomerate, a textile mesh, a coral colony. Here again, Vincent Mauger manipulates scales, plays with the weight of repetition, and cultivates the irregular fringes of a potentially proliferating work.

 

Other paradoxical sculptures: these four metal structures combine an original random shape (a 3D-deformed pebble) with an industrial framework, whose hollowed-out edges are reminiscent of certain mechanical parts. Similar to freehand drawings, the imperfect cuts and wobbly edges contradict the impression of objects that have been designed and manufactured industrially. The dual perception of these shapes and their framework undoubtedly ties in with an issue already mentioned in relation to Vincent Mauger's work: a space for thought between the materialization and dematerialization of the object.

 

The video presented in the exhibition fits perfectly into this mental space: the screen acts as a magnifying glass, focusing attention on a detail, and this fragment of architecture suddenly shifts from the tangible to the intangible. Softness, undulation, liquefaction. Echoing his orthonormal installation and providing a formal counterpoint, Vincent Mauger enjoys playing with our sense of reference points. Using simple means, he cultivates powerful mirage-like sensations.

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Des outils pour un nulle part, by Frédérique Emprou

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Vincent Mauger's artistic arrangements develop fictions in the same way that spaces are deployed. The artist's installations are not static images; they convey meaning.
Temporary zones of autonomy, these untitled works proceed by shifts and displacements, like matrices or projection surfaces.
Edifices made of paper balls, wooden objects with heliotrope frames, flat surfaces made of bricks—they constitute manufactured topographies.
One of the characteristics of Vincent Mauger's practice lies in the equivalence he induces between formal design and technical realization, the use of simple materials, and the interplay with the exhibition space.
As an architect, mason, and carpenter, the artist likes to oscillate between drawing and three-dimensionality, in the same way that one might represent places of virtuality, whether feigned or concrete.
Between high tech and heavy construction, he skillfully manipulates artifice and artifact, as exemplified by his videos, which are truly “constructed” from models.
Using interlope modeling, his pieces develop a neutral and impersonal mental concept.
The in situ work is thus akin to successive scaling of translated, reformulated landscapes, which the viewer enters, both literally and figuratively.
The pencil sketch acts as a relief, the cutouts recall the lines of a graphic palette, and the “analog” relationship is understood here as described by the writer René Daumal.
These are daydreams that turn the viewer standing in front of Vincent Mauger's works into a solitary wanderer.

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L’architecture de l’esprit, by Léa Chauvel-Lévy

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Vincent Mauger's architectural spaces function as projection grounds. First and foremost, his own, since his cells act as so many cells in a mental space. Then those of others, because we immerse ourselves in them as we would immerse ourselves in the human mind. Thus, the eye encounters a form of duality between architecture and the organic. A materialization of thought in action. His metastructures thus illustrate the naked progression of their creator.
Metal, tiles, wood, glass—the materials used are all diverted from their primary function. This is the case with cinder blocks, which usually form the foundation of a building and are generally covered and hidden. Here, they are exaggerated, brought to the forefront and constitute the work itself. They are there to illustrate the milestones of a line of reasoning that is being constructed before our eyes.

We can therefore hypothesize that the viewer is confronted with the extension of the artist's cerebral domain. This is evident in his tubes and scales made of aluminum and polished stainless steel, which stand like soldiers in front of an entrance door. This can be seen as an expression of uncertainty in the face of the unknown. What will we find behind this door? A host of questions may arise before entering a space that is both closed and open. By placing this work in front of this strategic location, it takes on a symbolic aura.

His large-scale installation in situ in the Chapelle des Calvairiennes in Mayenne is representative of the contamination of a space by the imagination. The floor strewn with thousands of bricks offers a new landscape, bringing the idea of nature into a sacred place. The bricks are arranged in such a way as to form hills and mountains, inviting abstraction. This is the power of this work: it offers a chiasm between two ideas, that of the religious institution and that of the secular world. This work, reinterpreted at the La Maréchalerie art center in Versailles, offered its counterpart, in reverse. This time, the bricks were arranged in such a way as to open up abysses. No more hills and mountains, but craters, chasms, gaps. The space thus recreated changed status. We stood facing shifting ground, uncertain. The architecture of the space occupied by Vincent Mauger changes irrevocably and takes on a new nature with each intervention.  

Like these polystyrene elements that appear to be an extension of a balcony. Or these bottle racks that completely cover a ceiling. Vincent Mauger's works reconfigure spaces, contaminate them, like swarms of bees grafted onto a chimney. They are the organic extension of architecture but, excitingly, through materials generally associated with construction or the building industry. The work presented by Abstract Room illustrates this perfectly: it thwarts the straight lines naturally associated with bricks and lends malleability and plasticity to rigidity. It challenges architecture, bending it, twisting it, playing with it. A product of the human mind, architecture is here reinvested from its most conceptual angle.

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Vincent Mauger, la sculpture renaissante, by Alexandrine Dhainaut

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Unstable equilibrium
Vincent Mauger's sculptures have the sophistication of simple things: they are basic shapes, mostly curved or straight lines; they are graphic works, small, medium, or large in size, even monumental, oscillating between the conciseness of an autonomous object and the expanse of a landscape; they are made of seemingly bland materials that could be described as poor (bottle racks, plastic bins or pipes, cinder blocks, bricks), or raw materials such as wood, steel, aluminum, plywood, or melamine. The artist starts with their intrinsic qualities, working with their rigidity, brittleness, or flexibility, sublimating them through various processes of burning or cutting, which can be rough or meticulous depending on the case, and through skillful assembly, elevating them in the strict sense to structures that ultimately become forms. These sculptures, placed directly on the ground or suspended in midair, exude a certain poetry, a romanticism of the lonely object, as if washed up, and an undeniable harmony. But the precariousness of these freestanding sculptures also exudes a form of tension, all the more noticeable when the edges are protruding and the balance is precarious (to see this for yourself, just watch the filmed performance of the artist standing on a table like a tightrope walker while cutting it with a chainsaw). Vincent Mauger's sculptures also have a hyper-physicality, especially when they are monumental or when they unfold into a landscape, a rocky mass or a portion of imaginary territory, drawing us into a certain vertigo/vestige of an indeterminate time. 

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Contemporary marquetry
Close to the abstraction of Richard Deacon, Vincent Mauger is nevertheless, along with Raphaël Zarka, the most reborn of contemporary artists. While the latter set his sights on the rhombicuboctahedron, everything in Mauger's work brings us back to the fundamental subject of art history: perspective. Through the extremely graphic nature of his projects, the interplay of solids and voids, flatness and relief, depth of field and scale, the notion of landscape and the question of perspective and vanishing lines (issues that are also found in his lithographs and photographs), Vincent Mauger's work could be likened to the noble art of Italian Renaissance marquetry. Particularly in his ability to create illusions by constructing linear, straight, or curved spaces (aided by 3D modeling) and to introduce rhythm into empty space by repeating the same geometric module. Viewed from this angle, we find an answer to the obliquity of the sculptures. For Vincent Mauger, crookedness is what leaning books or half-open doors were to marquetry artists: an opportunity to complicate representation, the playful joy of constantly creating “a back-and-forth between the real and the virtual.”

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