Valentin

Eric Baudart

24 May - 28 Jun 2008

Eric Baudart
May 24th - June 28th 2008

The expositions of Eric Baudart often resemble mental landscapes, a mixture of memories and of impressions, of reminiscences and of sensations where the object becomes picture and where the picture becomes object. But they also can perceive as potential spaces suspending somewhere where every object or picture of object to assert through its material presence the strength of enticement and it’s illusory character.

With Eric Baudart, the enticement operates by the choice of solid or friable materials, translucent or opaque, fluid or thick, wrinkled or hazy like the way the artist confronts (the heavy steel pétanques on pads of soft foam), manhandles (the crumpled paper seized to the scanner), or expanded (adding plaster on a wall or by using resin crudely molding a sofa). Effects of transparency, of reflection, of reverberation appear as to contradict these material matters sometimes too real: discreet presence but persistent of the plexiglas on the Diasec; The shimmering surface of the Mylar, the translucency of the resin, or the transparency of water and glue; effects of sense of smell provoked by the video image (Black Hole) or of reverberation originating from scanners... equipment leaves the time/place to a brief instant (a second disappears in obscurity), to the illusory (the moon that a high resolution video camera never reaches to capture in its clarity). Nothing in this landscape seems to distinguish the object from the matter and the picture. All is potential and real, intact and reconstructed. This indecision jumbles our perception and reduces the level of reality.

The title Pétaflops refers to the computational capacity of calculating ten millions to billion operations per second. The universe of Eric Baudart seems to caress this desire for a work that mirrors these ultraperformaning machines. Is it a diminution of an impression down to the fragment of a second or is it a delusion one way or another?
 

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