For forty years already Gilles Mihalcean's sculptures have exuded their serene strangeness and projected stories nourished by the community, without confining themselves to the past for all that. For this exhibition the artist takes on the question of space travel both in what it evokes for contemporary society with its quest for new inhabitable territories, and as a reaching out to a vast field of most singular possibilities. It is more precisely in working from the wormhole theory of astrophysics, which posits the existence of tunnels or bridges whereby one can travel from one point in the Universe to another, that Mihalcean thinks the passages and transformations, of humans and formless matter alike, which escape any ordered comprehension.
The figure of the astronaut, which stands in the centre of a first wooden structure, is in the image of this precariousness. Caught in a meshwork of broken chairs, he appears to be both in freefall and in a state of weightlessness, and unable to break free from this cylinder whose material weight is made immediately evident. However, this static scene first and foremost suggests an abstract dimension where the elements are to be taken on their own terms, without having recourse to narrative determinations or any rigid categorizations. Similarly, a second structure invites the viewer to look through a hole to observe a soaring and tubular perspective; a sort of telescopic view on the universe. Behind this Planck Wall, by way of motifs that overlap terrestrial engineering with stellar geometries, the viewer encounters elements reminiscent of science fiction imagery Here again, Mihalcean's turns away from concepts and leaves the question of failure, both in relation to our capacity to survive in our earthly environment and as it pertains to our attempts to conquer the macrocosm, up in the air.
[AS, trans PdB]
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