In a digital world where relationships and transactions are increasingly becoming “contactless”, the omnipresence of screens and algorithms has progressively brought about new ways of living together and (dis)connecting, along with new norms of looking and talking, new forms of voyeurism and exhibitionism. A multitude of filters and masks luring us into a generalized panoptic fantasy (and an obvious organized surveillance) largely contained by the new tools and contemporary uses, which are not without consequences, thus reduces the “opacity” of the social body.

Since 2016, Guillaume Linard Osorio has been using polycarbonate: a synthetic material that is lighter, more resistant and insulating than glass, commonly used to build roofs, conservatories, greenhouses etc. Made of several layers of transparent slates, it provides an intermediate space inside which the artist injects ink with a syringe one compartment after the other. Sometimes, via torsion of the material or a blowing system used as a fixator, the artist diverts or stops the rectilinear drips obtained through mere gravitational effect, which slowly creates very graphic abstract landscapes. At first, this new technique allowed the artist to produce works of various formats he would hang on the wall; but for this exhibition he wants to put these objects back into space, reconnecting with the original use of the material (and his architecture background), in order to experience the “architecturality” of these literally in vitro paintings.

Conceived on site, the device consists of several very large format “painted” polycarbonate slates, like screen-walls forming a space within the space, as well as a mise-en-abyme. Permeable, the piece induces some internal circulation while proposing new – filtered – visions of the space and the other elements displayed. An experience intended to be physical, sensitive, and even psychic, rather than retinal. Surrounded by floating liquid images that evoke sonograms and blur their perception and reference points, visitors found themselves in an in-between, standing on an invisible “critical threshold”. In architectural jargon, the expression refers to the moment when a window vibrates under the effect of certain sound frequency, thus temporarily loosing its acoustic insulation property (1). It also evokes a change of state, a transitional space-time, a space of transformation. Like the device around which it revolves, the exhibition works as an interface emphasizing the space, although thin, between the self and the other – communicating entities in essence, even in silent mode-, thus alluding to several dialectics (inside/outside, introversion/extraversion etc.), including phenomena of porosity. This exhibition therefore aims at reinvesting – and rethinking – what, concretely and affectively, connects and disconnects us.

Anne-Lou Vicente, September 2019

(1)Conceived to interact with the device rather than interpret it, several performances will take place during the exhibition.

« The end of History » affirms a faith in man’s ability to surpass his own condition. Belief in progress finds expression in Hegel’s “The end of History”. Reason and technique should bring about the resolution of conflicts, heralding an age free of tension and beyond the boundaries of contradiction.
The places in the series « Heterotopia; The end of history » are self- imposed through their monolithic rigidity and appear as unalterable truths. The colossal face of these sculptures exudes that which seems eternally enduring. In an instant the gaze is seduced into forgetting and contesting the truth portrayed in « Heterotopia; The tragic downfall » which exposes the vanity of the monument and the precarious nature of society.
Belief in progress is irresistible. In flattering the eye it blinds us. Standing in the middle of this artificial rowdiness, this excess of civilisation perfectly detached from nature – a nature that appears here as an object for mourning – the viewer loses their footing, falling deeper into an abyss of culture. The dazzled gaze is overpowered. In a futile search for clarity, little by little, it allows itself to be swallowed whole. Man, as part of nature, is no more. He has entered the end of History, a time wherein his putrescent matter vanishes within the inorganic entrails of this surgical topography.
Vincent J. Stoker