ART-PRESENTATION: Nicolas Darrot-Règne Analogue
Nicolas Darrot creates animal mechanisms as way of talking about human society in the manner of Aesop and La Fontaine. The artist belongs to a younger generation of artist-inventors who use computers to programme the life of artificial creatures, entities that are at once human, animal, machinic and even ecological characters. A soundtrack synchronised with the movement at times make them talk.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: La maison rouge Archive
Nicolas Darrot was one of the first artists to be invited, in 2006, to produce “Passage au noir” for the patio of La maison rouge. This time, Nicolas Darrot is presenting “Règne Analogue”, a vast and ambitious solo exhibition that includes the first showing of 20 new works. His practice takes multiple ranges from sculpture, installation to hybrid and animated objects, with references spanning science, history, myths and literature. “Règne analogue” is a new narrative and another subdivision of the world that moves between animal and mineral. It seeks to replicate living beings following a different logic that goes beyond human considerations to confront us with a sometimes unsettling but always poetic image. In the main gallery, two huge, evanescent phantoms twist and turn alongside an equally animated and hirsute companion. We see a deer whose antlers have been set ablaze, a fuzzy lamb caressed by a gold curtain a Kevlar hive from which honey permanently flows, and a metal ibis pecking at the ground in a never-ending circle. Meanwhile, pixel by pixel a lighthouse beams an image from the furthest reaches of the universe. The exhibition also returns to some of Darrot’s earlier works, including the “Dronecast” series (2002-08) of mutant insects-cum-war machines, “Curiosae” in which groups of insects dominate each other and the humour series of “Injonctions” (2008-09) with its moving, talking puppets. Also included is a group of works, assembled by the artist, that constitute a sort of “natural history of machines” and which evoke the shift from the realm of animal to artefact. In the exhibition 80 works on different scales, each releasing its charge of energy at different moments, endlessly surprise and transform the visitor. They appear to us as active forces, contemporary fetishes responding one to the other to form a cosmogony, the analogue reign of a life form that emerges from inductive and poetic logics. Darrot proceeds under cover, interpreting with both gravity and humour scenes in which the ordinary dramas of existence attach themselves to the movements of the stars.
Info: La maison rouge, fondation antoine de galbert, 10 Boulevard de la Bastille, Paris, Duration: 8/7-18/9/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.lamaisonrouge.org
