No Place Like Home
Installation of drawings and video – 2023
Drawings: 3D scan and vectorization plotted with a drawing machine (pen plotter), combined with hand drawing in ink, black chalk, and pencil on paper – 70 × 100 cm – Plotting: Nicolas Guillemin
Looped video : 9 min – 2K – 2023
Two large double-sided drawings, in which a figure appears trapped within his own face, are set against a video where a death-row inmate smokes his last cigarette and drifts into wandering thoughts (Where Ruins Are Born).
The drawings stage a duality reminiscent of the unmasked Wizard of Oz: the subject oscillates between the figure of the prisoner and that of the puppeteer. The video juxtaposes the inner intimacy of a condemned man’s mind with the ritual of his final cigarette. While the prison setting draws from both the French past and the American present, the mental projections are created using 3D scans. At the end of his cigarette, the inmate vanishes into smoke, taking with him the agents of a justice system willing to enact what it condemns: death itself.
These mental constructions contain their creator; they build themselves and dissolve. Are they the remnants of an impossible future, or of memories fading away?
In a movement both tragic and absurd, the installation invokes portraiture and cinema, paradoxically layering non finito sculpture with virtual ruins.
EXHIBITIONS
2023
- solo exhibition at Castelet, Toulouse, FR
