Éric Baudart - Chloé Delarue - Gyan Panchal

This exhibition began with the idea of bringing together three artists who practice sculpture and don’t know each other. They have things in common, such as the use of discarded manufactured objects, but their work is fairly dissimilar, follows distinct trajectories and involves diverse gazes. What do they have to say to each other in this non-chosen context? Naturally, the idea would then be for the exhibition to be something more than the juxtaposition of pre-existing pieces, which all too often characterizes group shows, and an opportunity to allow spontaneous affinities to occur.

ÉRIC BAUDART

Éric Baudart practices the art of gleaning and reinventing through the reappropriation of scrapped or insignificant objects that no one usually notices: sometimes taken as is, like readymades, and amplified; or reworked and transformed to underscore an aesthetic quality – form, materiality or way of making light vibrate – in order to "become matter." Playing with scale and optics, coverings, serialization or spatial redisposition, here they are in another light far removed from our humdrum blind spots. In Éric Baudart’s contribution at Hôpital La Grave, they are multiplied, like his serially repeated radiators (OTS, 2021) or rolls of plastic film (Wrap 2.0, 2017), a strange, tentative assembly, torn between anamorphosis and the potential onset of a coming fall. An enigmatic and playful call for beauty and re-enchantment in order to "rediscover affection for reality and its materiality."

With the support of RAJA

CHLOÉ DELARUE

Since 2015, Chloé Delarue has worked according to a system she created and named TAFAA (Toward A Fully Automated Appearance). Through sculptures or wraparound, even tentacular installations, with a subtitle added in voiceover, the aim is to reflect on and experiment with the growing presence of digital tools. With neither fascination for, nor denunciation of, our relationship to technology, she imagines and explores the organico- machinic space that could well be part of ourselves now. And she grafts simulation, the virtual, or artificialized materials with organic effects onto her hybrid works. With a predilection for neon lights, engines and electricity, she engenders pieces that may be standalone or evolving, sketching "a future that might grow old before we reach it." Here and now, we are invited to feel and meditate on a relationship to the world that has been altered by sub-visible changes, while we are absorbed in a kind of vortex by the flurry of allegories of a hypothetical future.

With the support of Pro Helvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture

GYAN PANCHAL

We need to accompany objects "to the threshold of themselves," according to Gyan Panchal. We need to produce sculptures to give them back to the world and "forge a fair imbalance with it." Gyan’s work as a sculptor begins with an encounter with inoperable industrial objects or materials, artifacts and everyday objects that he picks up like a modern-day scrap merchant. He takes the objects in, observing the materials, seeing what is going on with them, then modifies them in simple ways – covering, removing, reversing, hanging – that revitalize them and give them a new story to tell. And to prolong this interventionist cycle, there is the organization of an encounter with the space, such as with Hôpital La Grave, near the banks of the Garonne. Thus, the stripped-down freezer frosted with toxic-looking yellowish foam and the inverted remains of a trampoline resemble abandoned vestiges after a catastrophe, flood or hurricane. Arranged seemingly on the edge of themselves, of the space and of the exhibition, in precarious situations, as if left hanging, Gyan Panchal’s sculptures are at once traces and allegories, and display a hazy anxiety.

Made available by Hôpitaux de Toulouse, the cafeteria of the former school of midwifery at Hôpital La Grave has been repurposed thanks to the patronage of Groupe Pierre Fabre, and with the support of FP01 architects, EXECO, GB Énergies and Dauphiné Isolation 31.