The exhibition Apnea at Le Corridor brings together artists Sylvie Romieu and Sylvère. The title, apnea in Italian, in its rhythmic sonority, suggests the suspended time inherent in the artist’s creative process, like the moment of truce, of liberation offered to the viewer by the vision of a work of art.
Sylvie Romieu presents a series of photographs and sculptures linked to the territory, the temptation of refuge, of an imaginary habitat.
She stages precarious assemblages of shaped maps and light, volatile plant particles before photographing them. These impalpable, ethereal mental landscapes are so fragile and unstable that the artist has to hold her breath before and while the camera is triggered. The geographical map, supposed to indicate reality, is crumpled and rendered illegible. Beyond the seductive softness of the pastel or finely acid colors, the scattering of grasses, seeds and pollen suggests a universe in germination, in mysterious becoming, disquieting and disconcerting, with an immediately obvious poetry.
His plant sculptures, combinations of twigs, wild grasses and seeds gleaned from his Corbières territory, become delicate habitations, sometimes covered by a Plexiglas cube or a glass bell. References to the instability of our planet, to the impermanence of things?
Sylvère’s works are immediately reminiscent of immemorial beauty. Their timelessness generates real aesthetic emotion. His muted, monochromatic paintings in gray, lead and anthracite are enhanced by outcrops of chalk and pencil, imprints, traces, shapes and simple, repetitive geometric signs. He uses whatever materials he can get his hands on: canvas, cardboard, fabric, wood. He also engraves, just as the cave artists used the irregularities, hollows and bumps in the wall. For Sylvère, the memory of art lies in prehistory, a point he underlines ironically by titling his works in reference to Lascaux. His paintings hark back to an earlier time, reclaiming the archaic and universal art of the wall, the very essence of original art.
