Balades

HUBERT MAROT – Balades by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos Hubert Marot presents at Fonds de dotation Franklin Azzi in Paris a series of photographs, two ins- tallations and a video, all relating to a state that I would describe as circumspect. His practice is illu- sionistic: photographs are paintings, installations sculptures; but is also prudent, wise, meticulous. It comes from observation, from the careful gaze he takes around him. His work is also marked by a form of mysterious triviality and a penchant for antiquity, the imperishable, a race that he knows is lost in advance. For him everything depends on the event held in suspension, a few moments that he cuts off arbi- trarily and chooses, even pampers, once the impulse vanished. He practices photography, painting, installation in often fragilely established forms. He is also an artist who is part of a tradition of sceptic humor with regard to his works as well as his contemporary environment which is as if put under a bell, under a dome of spleen and slight paranoia. First there are his living or hypnagogic still-life photographs between a state of sleep and semi-awakening, photographed using a Canon AE-1film camera equipped with a small powerful flash to create harsh shadows like old police photographs. And it is true that his work is partly criminal documentation of minor cases. On a linen canvas subjected to strong tensions, he mummifies his routine photographic corpse compositions. Thus, “one after the other; skin glue, gesso, undercoat and finally a photosensitive emulsion. The image is then projected on the wall with an enlarger and then finally developed using three silver chemistries: developer, stop bath, fixer. The pieces are then colorized with oil paint, sometimes very diluted for the flat areas (a sort of juice) and sometimes really “painted” in certain places.” The derisory thing, I was saying... the holiday accident of the fifth week of paid leave (Ma- rot is French...) are transformed into Houellebecquian antique pieces, rouged to get through their purgatories and access a certain perpetuity. To the end-of-century morbid luxuriance of the French deviants of the 19th century, to the saturated and gargantuan compositions of the Flemish masters of the 17th century, he opposes a 21st century vision: placid, neurasthenic, relativistic but always linked to a form of sentimentality. The work is prepared as would a thanatologist who cleans and powders the body of the deceased. In the conceptual tradition of Frank Stella or even more recently Wade Guyton, his photographs are sleight of hand, hybridized mediums of an artist not yet recove- red from everything but phlegmatic, as if imbued with a traditional depressive lucidity. Thus, although random and partly due to chemical chance, the compositions proceed in the manner of vanitas by allegorical friction. Poire nasale et boules azurées du col de Vence opens the dance with its austere thistles, its curative overtones, and a life that spins, burns from the moment a match strikes. In Buddleias et duo de pistache-choco, the fiery butterfly bush stands beside the absurdly diminutive recurrence of a miniature hubcap and an afterparty pastry. In PEZ et limaçons de Cor- rens, a rabbit-headed PEZ dispenser, spilling over with candies, shares the frame with small white snails, clinging to dry trails of slime on sprigs of rosemary—a tableau that feigns collective hysteria. Then there’s Marguerites du Queyras et tue-mouches, where indifferent flowers, loyal yet detached, exist alongside brown flypaper smeared with dipteran corpses—a hallmark of dingy camper vans. Virginal and resilient winter flowers risk the guillotine in a tin can perhaps left by a tramp in a Parisian park in Perce-neiges du square Hector Berlioz et couteau. We are in contact with pure contempo- rary vanitas, compositions of objects from garage sales, old towns, edges of overloaded bathroom shelves, peripheral rave rooms, cheap talismans, trinkets, objects of predation and restoration which cut, shave, pierce, pull, sponge, rub. These vanities are like dark, brutal realities, tender truths too, because there is nothing more tender than compositions torn between these two polarities. With these works, death ceases waiting, the enslavement of waiting to be, vanity and disillusionment. Hubert Marot’s pieces are exorbitant and mutate with strange solitudes. Strange and fleeting solitudes: Let’s talk about his sculptures of inner tubes, carbon black tubes which intertwine into ouroboros, tubular knots which curve by twisting on rectangular and metallic rib cages. His two sculptures which order, overlook with their volumes; in fact manifest a thwarted authority which only exists in the present moment - only for those who believe in it -. His are air pump systems that are proudly, inflated like a fleeting stroke of power. This mechanical protection system invented in 1885 by Dun- lop in Scotland evokes here more discomfort, a body subjected to external pressures. This anti-Al- lan Kaprow (Yard, 1961) where disordered tires saturated the exhibition and became a happening, child’s game, becomes here a symbol of hemorrhaging bodies, subjected to a struggle or even puni- shment. His glossy black tori, or geometric tubes closed on themselves, are all schematic versions of sculptures of Hercules triumphing over Cerberus, of Michelangelo’s rebellious or dying slaves, of a Laocoon struggling in the embrace of serpents but taken under the industrial aegis of Bruce Nauman or John Dogg (the fictitious artist created by Richard Prince and Colin de Land and fan of large cars). Here, we find ourselves in the realm of pastiche—a steroidal sculpture, paradoxically fleeting. Its swollen forms and opportunistic volumes teeter between heroic excess and pathetic existence, resembling oxygen-starved relics, abandoned on beaches or relegated to second-rate garages. Intermittently, colorful valves appear, with a charm that is equal parts playful and ostentatiously cus- tomized, discreetly nestled within the curves of these overinflated sculptures. These valves function as talismans, relic-like objects, or dilettante fashion accessories. It’s a fitting gesture, a microscopic ceremony that concludes this transient sculpture—a masculine flourish as the valves are metapho- rically sealed. Everything here becomes an allegory of swelling, a tribute to inflation, encapsulated within this erect altar. Wishing is presented at the intersection of the exhibition. Men, filmed unknowingly, polish the bo- dies of their cars. Their hands glide over the surface, grazing, caressing, losing themselves in the curves of the chassis, absorbing their chilled sweat. The neutral tones of Volkswagen, Mercedes, and Citroën C5 polos create an aesthetic of disappearance, a kind of grey ecology. These scenes, captured without consent, evoke a solitary and selfish suspension, bordering on the onanistic—a series of masturbatory images where a man cossets and lavishes affection and tenderness upon his accessory. What emerges is a curious blend of elevation and guilt. The site becomes both a place of pleasure and a space of purification. The video savagely captures—always leaning toward indul- gence—the care, the ablutions, or the guilty compulsion to erase undesirable traces: a crime scene, a hit-and-run, a sullied adulterous surface. From this cleansing, a potential elevation emerges: wi- shing, like a wish made while rubbing a genie’s lamp. The artist probes this fetishistic gesture, this symbolic act of cleansing—a playful nod to Mr. Clean. In the final wooden room, the closing installation of mats, composed of interlocking PVC tiles remi- niscent of a detailing garage, is conceived as a site-specific intervention. These tiles morph into geo- metric forms, framed patterns in acidic green or violet, grids with op-art, Tetris, and techno motifs. Their calm arrangement also lays claim to an American minimalist heritage. Here, form is no longer merely form but place—a space that interacts through contrast (with the wood and stained glass), striving to harness physical energy while underscoring the void within the room. This floor sculpture, following in the tradition from medieval tombstones to Carl Andre, invites being walked on, trampled—a physical encounter with the terrain, a testing of the site. The sculpture is no longer an object to be carved but assembled, nearly devoid of volume, renouncing one of its ancient predicates. Yet, unlike Carl Andre, this work does not shy away from symbolism. It could evoke a dance floor, a narthex for baptismal rites, or even the site of a firing squad. Life is a set of small, indefinitely repeated, often empty rites. What is also beautiful is this idea of considering the works of Hubert Marot from a humorous angle even though they are more tearful than they seem. Laughter and anguish are intrinsically mixed there, a tragic laughter, the kind that reminds us of being familiar with a family member, a friend, an object, a city or vacation spot for a given time. Yet everything dies.