"Are you sleeping?". A simple question. Surrounded by silence. Asked from insomnia, to get out of solitude or to share it. An open question for nocturnal desire, an entry into the telephone in the other's bed. Hesitant, foggy, inaudible: a mirage, the waiting that lasts the immensity of a sky.
Tu dors? is an installation created in pairs based on their most recent plastic and conceptual research. It interweaves photographic series and fragments of diaries by Angèle Manuali, as well as drawings-poems and mosaic sculptures by Mathis Berchery. A meeting of two artistic approaches that share a strong commitment to the connection between humans and the rest of the living world, an attraction to research on the appearance of the landscape, the link between the organic and the metaphysical, the Selenite dream, the emergence of speech and the floating of words. An exhibition conceived as a photographic, graphic, textual and fragmented score that brings together rest and anxiety, confidence and solitude, emptiness and saturation.
The photographic series stems from an intensive experience of self to self, and to the earth. Convinced to be on a huge body, it is a reconnection with the instincts and perceptions that make humans first and foremost animals of this world: between uncertainty and confidence, fear and overcoming, nocturnal agitation and wonder. In the dim light of day and the rays of night, the white sounds of the sea and the wind, the senses are disturbed, reality is raw and uncertain.
At the same time, inner voices intrude, punctuating the space of the photographic storyboard and giving these almost lunar or underwater landscapes a troubled context, where death is an encounter among others, but where the torment of a potential predator tints the mist.
A message intrusive message received in the night was the trigger for this poetic and photographic photographic writing, a writing of anxiety, vulnerability and feminist defiance.
The drawings are made from squared sheets filled in with an automatic hand gesture. Images of sky are thus revealed according to an inner weather, fruits of an active meditation, of a crossing of time. Their aesthetic refers to black and white photography and the challenge of representing clouds, of fixing the ephemeral and the metamorphoses of life. The drawings are inhabited by poems, in the form of dialogues, which accompany the vibration of the image. With nocturnal and metaphysical complicity, the words are deposited on the pages and give abstract and indeterminate bodies to the landscapes, in a vaporous and stripped language.
The mosaics made with Belgian blue stone form a mineral counterpoint to the drawings. Made from maritime pine plywood, the cut-out shapes are those drawn by the tree cut into thin sheets. The board becomes a natural-industrial given that induces autopoietic forms that offer an organic framework to the gaze. Suspended in space, they compose a landscape in the form of a fragmented puzzle and a shadow theatre emanating from the photographs and drawings.
