philippe-cometti-DP

THE EXHIBITION

This experimentation with the portrait was literally embodied by two artists who use body and voice as their means of expression in the world of performing arts and the stage: Carolyn Carlson and Barbara Hannigan.

Two dimensions or three, flat or volume; we’re used to perceiving forms in ways that seem mutually exclusive: either a thing belongs in the register of length and width, or it’s in the three-dimensional domain. It can only be one or the other.
But if we remove an image from the abstraction by which it is usually defined, be it a photograph or painting, such an image, by its inherent materiality, does have an element of thickness to it. Similarly, a sculpture does have an element of flatness. There are several instances in the history of art where the dimensional gulf between the flat world and the world of volumes is bridged and intentionally reduced.
We want to try and make the same object cohabit the two borders of these two worlds, separated by customary practice as much as by perceptive convention. But instead of fragile crossing points, “Êtres interdimensionnels” aims to create the connective tissue establishing a link, therefore a firm continuity – not just a passage, but a non-separation – between one and the other

Each object displayed in this exhibition embodies both the flat and volume, therefore the world of the image as much as sculpture: an impure object. They propose a new dimension for us to see, feel and understand, a new dimension between the line and volume, somewhere between the second and third dimension. The idea is to create an intermediary object with a variable dimension depending on the eye that sees it, wandering somewhere between 2 and 3: 2.15, 2.44, 2.76, 2.81, and so on. We want to explore the infinity of intermediary dimensions between the 2nd and the 3rd, of which there are as many as your mind can imagine.

So this is an exploratory project, an experiment intended to produce a particular space, a specific mode of space or occupation of space from which a proposed new format of portrait can emerge, where the usual depiction of objects is disrupted and oscillates ceaselessly from one dimension to another, as we see here.