ANTOINE AGUILAR, DREAM REALITY
Chambon-sur-Lignon’s art center Les Roches presents the first personal exhibition of the young artiste Antoine Aguilar, graduate of Nantes art academy. In the white cube setting of the art center eight pieces are presented in the form of drawing, light installation and video.Antoine Aguilar treats light, which gushes out of the support medium, a sort of syncretism of Seurat and Monet. The impressionist studied the subject of autonomous lighting of a painting through the use of colour, the metaphoric light flowing from the painting itself. In the case of Seurat, the light does not come exclusively from the use of colour, but from the support, making it appear as an element of the composition, his watercolour paintings being the most convincing evidence.
Antoine Aguilar explores, in his manner, these fields of research which desire that light, the vehicle of the senses, emerges from the support. Here it is not a matter of landscapes, but of images stemming from television and video. He attempts to transcend what we can call mediatic light. Cézanne exalts light from the landscapes of the mountain Sainte-Victoire; Antoine Aguillar makes lights spring out of the support.
One can discern in his approach, in a remark, a denunciation of the “mass image”. Here the artist transports us in another subject, a poetry of evanescence, of mist, which gives a vision of surfaces with unformed contours. This being all the more pertinent as we evolve in a society which controls image, bringing rarely alternatives of uncontrolled escapism.
In the centre of a black box, he has integrated a flat screen which broadcasts “France 2” continuously, and where the image is blurred due to the superposition of opalescent glass panes. The box emits a distorted image, the coloured surfaces changing dependent on the different programs broadcast. In this way we learn to define the colour fields of each program in the fashion of a painter’s palette.
Not far from there, a television set turns its back to the black box and spouts from its screen a cone of broken glass, a sort of magmatic flow animated by a variation of colours, from the red of lava to glacial blue. Lights burst out of
the case and spreads into the reality of the world. These two pieces have in common the propagation of internal light,
that expands onto the surrounding environment. Soft diffusion, all over, going against the unpleasant flow poured out by the television channels.
This utopia continues with a video installation, a recording of an imprecise reflection of water, that reflects on a mirror installed on the ground and finishes its path on the vertical wall in the manner of Monet’s Nymphéa. The video projector and the wires are arranged such that they form an element of vegetation.
The series of four drawings is the result of a connection with light by partial abstraction of the support. From simple point work carried out with a Rotring pen Antoine Aguilar divulges the internal light of the support, in concealing the support he makes its luminescence emerge.
Tal Coat said that the finishing touches, the last glazes, sustained the light, in some way signifying it. From the pixel to the ink dot, Antoine Aguilar revisits the revealing means of the internal light of the support. He does not bring light, he exposes it, he plays with it in the manner of a painter.
He gives what is to be seen as an utopian poetry, in the sense that his productions are landscapes, a representation of what is real, a “beyond”, behind this reality which is unsatisfactory for the poet. Antoine Aguilar paints utopic landscapes, a sort of dream topos, of images produced from a society where the notion of time is breaking up, experienced as a nuisance.
In this acceleration, Antoine Aguilar offers us a moment of poetic reflection, a break, where the utopia of a slower world, less verbose, which would allow the expression of the poet, where we would finally have enough time to dream of new landscapes.
Christian Garcelon translation Paula Stephen / Nicolas Wack