Substrat — 22,48 m² Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 11 → November 1, 2014

Cécile Beau is interested in phenomena too slow or too discrete for the human time scale; those we cannot see or are barely perceptible. She takes it to overturn our ordinary perceptions. With Substrat, she proposes a semi-subterranean fiction far from our usual references. The gallery becomes a sedimentary surface just waiting to modify. Daylight is there rarefied. Repetition of complex physical or organic phenomena, poetic reproductions of laboratory experiments or spatiotemporal fictions ?

Cécile Beau, Frangula, 2014 Racines — 170 × 230 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie 22,48 m², Paris

Frangula (2014), is a root surreptitiously insinuating itself into the gallery space through the ceiling, quietly. Érosion (2014) gives to hear the whirling movements of a dust particle pushed by the wind. By modeling the path of a particle, Cécile Beau makes of erosion a product of the imagination. The Thalle series (2014) shows familiar figures and yet indefinable : landscapes views from the sky, cell clusters ? Thalle (thallus) refers to the vegetative system of lichens. Feeding on dust carried by the winds they end up becoming substrates for other plants.

Cécile Beau, Érosion, 2014 Céramique, dispositif sonore, composition sonore de Gil Savoy — 50 × 90 × 20 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie 22,48 m², Paris

Surface and depth are reversed, human time scale and geologic time scale overlap. The thousands of years needed for elements to carve the stone are somehow moved to another scale, to the congruence of space-times impossible to reconcile.

Cécile Beau reveals the intuitive knowledge of the levels of organization of the universe, of their interweaving, so the short temporality of human action is always in her work a resurgence of the long temporality of the cosmos.