Nicolas Darrot — Molécule Eden — Eva Hober Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 18 → November 22, 2014

Adding a brazen string to his lyre

Nicolas Darrot adds a brazen string to his lyre. Giving solemnity to a silent fortune-teller’s head wearing a pointed hat. His eyes crying bronze, mouth shut. Edenic laconism.

They disappeared, the articulated mouths making mechanical sounds, with visible springs, electric circuits, diodes, coils, pistons, wires reeling and unreeling, the movement and the sound being activated through pressing a button, manually. Are these mechanisms mocking the living speech? And what if all speech acts were automatic? Aren’t we similar to those machines made by Nicolas Darrot, like spiritual automata that need to be activated to produce sound? We speak and we move, and we think under the effect of external stimuli, with an iron necessity.

So, the artist moves the cursor. Abrupt change switch on the tracks of meaning. The language is in the background. Here the mouth is linked directly to a stomach, and not to the living word. And this stomach contains spheres. Harmony of the Spheres produced by a predatory mouth. To be is primitive. We are the earth and we are crossed by the universe infrasound, ionized by the particles under our words, particles of the all powerful matter, particles running to us through the Space supposed empty whereas it is in fact filled by signals, waves, high and low frequencies, vibrations. The Space contains a secret irritating the mind, making it crazy and full of visions. A secret or a mystery? What can be found beneath Ursa Major? What can be found in its head? Constellation, conflagration, revelation. The repeated mechanical movements finally refused to inform us about our future. Therefore it was necessary to look for what is behind movement, to see what comes first, to see, to comprehend the hardness of the material being persevering through what seems perpetual change, perpetual flea, inexorable loss. It was necessary to fix, to assign the sensation to something persisting through time. To turn it into bronze, in order to discover the world as if it were new through synaesthesia.

To the indefinite openness of the meaning of language, the closed system of mechanical and repetitive constructions was first opposed, hypnotizing and perplexing the mind. Now it is the compact system of the dense matter, challenging the empty words, a compact system shaped by iron hands and a sharp mind. Looking for the experience of being material. Bronze brings back flesh to iron, organic tissues to metals from the universe, shapes to the coldness, the absolute coldness necessary to the conservation of the elements. These elements are forever repairing the universe.

Secretion, endless and slow flow of matter, concretion. Explosive assembly. Longitudinal section of a dissected eye set at the foot of an eruptive chicken leg. Voodoo universe. Wild. The vacuum of the space is saturated with dark energy. The coat of Death marries a cloud of helium and floats. Signs are inverted on the surface of icy water, more primitive than earth. And it becomes the fur of the most terrestrial animal on earth. Ursa Minor. The bear with the frosted white fur is related to the celestial object. Alchemy. The icy water of the mountains came one day from the far end of the universe on a comet. Nicolas Darrot diverted this comet from its normal trajectory in language, neutralising the word with its poetic function. Casting metal poetry.