Everything we touch can change

Believing again Intertwines, spirals, rosettes and mandalas punctuate Germain Marguillard’s universe. Enigmatic details on which the eye lingers, they emerge from the black and interrupt the initial impression of a minimalist and monolithic abstraction. In the implacable lines and edges that delimit his sculptures and structure our familiar representations, the artist uses this ornamental vocabulary to confront the scales of the infinitely large with the infinitely small. His half-organic, half-geometric figures are drawn from a universal sacred symbolism. They evoke the great spiritualities of Judaeo-Christianity and Islam, as well as the language of geometric science. Where either of these iconographies prides itself on achieving perfection and embracing supreme harmony, the artist’s gesture seeks instead to find organic accuracy, the closest thing to creation that, in its most natural emanation, eludes man and his hubris. Behind the two-colour scheme of his installations, between darkness and clarity, lies an eternal dialectic between reason and faith. He does not seek to resolve this intrinsic opposition, pointing instead to their similarities, both in their ambitions and in their methods. On the surface of the artist’s works, these symbols can be read as clues signalling the mutations from one belief to another.It is through patterns, always drawn and engraved by hand, that the artist takes us to the realms of esotericism and alchemy, to better shake and recompose the system of values and beliefs of the dominant rationalities, whether mathematical or religious. To this we can add the hijacking of functional objects, particularly scientific ones, such as the parabola and the particle accelerator, stripped of their traditional uses and made totems of a new cabalistic certainty. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s reflections on uncertainty and the malleability of rationality, the artist turns to subterranean and marginal beliefs, magic, divination and astrology to leave open the possibility of a different relationship with the world. The symbolism of forms is as significant as that of textures and substances, and the artist’s practice is characterised by a particular attention to materials and the skills associated with them. The artist’s critical spiritual sensibility is reflected in his choice of wood and clay, which undergo changes of state. The transformations, through modelling, shaping and chiselling, act as a mediation between different presences to the world. The passage through fire, which unifies everything in this sooty tone, carries with it the idea of both destruction and purification. With the naked eye and without the help of labels, the appearances are tricky, between burnt wood and ceramics. They invite you to come closer, to be surprised once again by the microscopic. The artist gives great importance to the composition of his sculptures in space, as he seeks to bring bodies into proximity. He deploys introspective environments to elicit unexpected sensorial experiences, sometimes disconcerting, sometimes bewitching. Invited for a residency at L’H du Siège in Valenciennes, Germain Marguillard is developing his research with new references, from Hartmut Rosa to Yuna Vincentin, as well as an ecofeminist pantheon. According to the German sociologist and philosopher, modern democracies still need religion. Whether it’s the conquest of space or the frenetic pursuit of hygiene, a myriad of new spiritualities and myths are trying to fill our anxious horizons. Darkened by ever more inescapable catastrophic environmental predictions, our very near future - and even our present - promises only conflict and exhaustion. In an attempt to reverse this aggressive relationship with others and the world, the artist proposes a space-time refuge in an octagonal wooden architectural unit, half in the dark, topped by a dome left open. It’s a call to pause, to take time out. Inside, at the centre of the convergence of the geometric floor, a ceramic urn stands on a pedestal. Its cavity lets out a sound loop that fills the minimal void of this black frame with voices. These recited poems are taken from an eco-feminist corpus dear to the artist, which includes works by Starhawk, Ursula K. Le Guin, Adrienne Rich and Kae Tempest, among others. They heighten the experience of contemplation, leading us towards meditation or a soothed trance from which the soul can rise. From this whole emerges a cathartic sensation and a new way of being, that of placing oneself under the protection of this temple of a cult lost or in the making. For researcher Yuna Vincentin, spirituality is a tool to be reappropriated in order to change the material relationships that structure the visible and compartmentalise modern thought. The artist gives a plastic interpretation of this link between the visible and the invisible, which needs to be redefined and redeployed. In addition to the central refuge, a series of ceramic panels mounted on burnt wood are scattered across the wall, some suspended in space. Intermediaries between the terrestrial and the celestial, they bear engraved messages borrowed from the same corpus of ecofeminist poetry. They are mantras of an absent demonstration procession, from which all that can be heard now is the echo, a little distant but persistent, almost on a bass frequency. The spirit that discovers them could be carried by these brief incantations towards a slowing down or on the trace of the cyclical passage of the seasons. These bits of meaningful sentences continue in the motifs that adorn them, somewhere between floral, plant and animal, in a harmonious ambiguity. Leaves or cupules. Oscillating waves or gems. Butterfly wings or four-leaf clovers. The lines and reliefs are organic, caught in the act of a continuous and repetitive metamorphosis from one species to another, from one world to another. Engraved on the reliquary at the entrance of the space, the title of the exhibition, Everything we touch can change, a quotation from the Starhawk song, punctuates this power of transformation with its refrain, whether virtuous or malefic. The visit begins with a ritual suggested by the artist. In this reliquary, visitors can, if they wish, entrust to the secret of the ceramic box their intentions for change in their lives or in society.