Exhibition views | Installations

The Rink, 2009.

(…) Gliding is naturally linked to surf and skate culture; that’s how I approached it and practiced it relentlessly. Today, however, I see it more as a way of thinking, a way of lubricating contradictions and discrepancies, of weaving the underlying links of a turbulent space. When I place a banana peel between two objects, it’s because the trajectory leading from one to the other is not a straight line, still less a gait, but a broken line, a ricochet, a complicated dance, a wiggle or a splitstep, a fall, a stroll perhaps.

All the wetting agents repertoried and delivered in the form of small hyperrealistic sculptures are to be grasped as interstitial segments between two or more states of a thought that doesn’t go straight. If we situate all the objects I present on the “skating rink” in the context I’ve just described, then the “skating rink” becomes the space where non-linear, non-reasonable thought can frolic and dance freely.(…)

(…) Thewetting agent must be slippery, making it easier to fall or accelerate. But three other properties are dear to me: metamorphosis, perforation and ventilation. They offer me the dream of a space in permanent mutation, perforated and irrigated, vascularized. The choices I make – whether in terms of objects or materials – meet these specifications. I see them as “passageways”: from hard to soft, from liquid to solid, from closed to open, from inside to outside, from slow to fast, from standing to lying down, from compact to fragmented… In every sense. However, I’m not trying to make an inventory or archive of them. I use wetting agents like bones use cartilage to break in two, in three, or more if the movement becomes complicated. (…)

Extract from the interview “Skating”, with Éric Mangion, 2009