Un calamar à la surface

Ludovic Hadjeras was born in 1996 in Besançon and graduated from the Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg in 2020. He also obtained a Master's degree from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2022, within the "Dirty art department". He currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Rémi Lécussan was born in 1997 in Saint-Amand-Montrond and graduated from the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Aix-en-Provence in 2022. He currently lives and works in Marseille. Benoît Pype was born in 1985 in Rouen and graduated from the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Montpellier in 2009, and then from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris in 2011. He holds a PhD from the SACRe program of the same school in 2022. He currently lives and works in Paris. Our generation seems to want to have the choice between moving towards more or less technology. The reality seems to draw a coexistence between these two intuitions. Water and electricity are two flows that, from our Western point of view, seem completely acquired, mastered and domesticated. The exhibition "Un calamar à la surface" (A squid to the surface) offers a set of works speaking about the link between the cycles of the living and our temptations as human beings to never leave them in their natural state. The show confronts us with materials such as cuttlefish bones, a tortoise shell, water, earth, millet, corn, feathers, and in the same space-time, a graphics card, PC fans, printed circuits, motors, cables, etc. The idea of electrification, coexisting with regressive flavors and processes, seems to draw an obviousness in our time. In both directions, we find this idea of a very powerful presence of energies. Whether they are material or intangible, these energies are essential to get us out of our state of mere muscular carcass. We need to be fascinated by the behavior of birds, the internet, a printed circuit, or even a drop of water. Progression or regression, animal or cyborg guided by artificial intelligence, high-tech or lowtech, no matter, we will never be satisfied with this world going too fast, full of advertisements, where the animal is a resource and nature is an object. So we create hybrids, chimeras, amalgams, we put in place tricks to be able to take a step back. I see the two works that Benoît Pype presents in the exhibition as essentialist experiments that could open a room full of solutions: to return to the uniqueness of simplicity, a drop of water, its disappearance, like an antiaccumulation that turns its back on our attitude of always wanting to accumulate more and more, rare and unique things. But who wants to live in destitution? Few people, not for long enough, and not radically enough. I imagine Ludovic Hadjeras becoming a bird and Rémi Lécussan becoming an AI, caught in inter-species thoughts, escaping the world left by the Capitalocene. They would be right to do so, there are no advertisements in a nest or in a computer program (not yet). Diego Bustamante, 2023.