Aurélien Froment
Centre Culturel Francais, Milan, Italy
‘How much information can one image contain? What differences (or relationship) exist between seeing, understanding and imagining?’ asks Andrea Viliani, curator of Aurélien Froment’s first solo show in Italy, entitled ‘Forms of Nature, Forms of Knowledge and Forms of Beauty’. Is it possible to describe the space that separates a word from an object? Verbal narratives and visual language proceed in parallel in the four chapters of the French artist’s exhibition, yet the material he investigates seems to be precisely the undecipherable void that separates these two narrative processes. Two recent video installations and two works specially made for this show constituted a small voyage of comprehension and exploration of forms.
It begins with the seductive images of the film Pulmo Marina (2010). A single tracking shot frames the movements of a jellyfish in the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, in an altered condition: the vat of water is backlit by a fluorescent tube, while a transparent acrylic film modifies the blue colour of the water, creating an apparently infinite chromatic field. The movements of the creature are accompanied by the voice of an actor offering a detailed account of every physiological, historical, etymological and geographic aspect of the jellyfish and its environment. Words and images, in their attempt to cling as closely as possible to each other, paradoxically separate, plunging the viewer into a state of near-hypnosis: the condition that exists prior to the deciphering or comprehension of a language, prior to comprehension.
The epistemological plot thickened with the sound of If I Were a Bell (2010), seven ceramic bells with wind-vane clappers, hung from the high ceiling of the space in front of the blue screen of Pulmo Marina. The bells were produced at Arcosanti, the Utopian community in the Arizona desert designed by Paolo Soleri in the 1970s. Froment collected them while they were still incomplete and undecorated. The construction of these small terracotta objects reflects, on a much smaller scale, the architectural precepts Soleri used in the creation of the large, shell-like habitats of the community. Again, the elements involved – the sound of the bells and their elementary geometric forms – have been separated and left in a pure state of parallel proximity, ready to assume a possible new order, another combination.
On the back wall of the space the projection of The Fourdrinier Machine Interlude (2010) slowly tracks the processes and movements of an enormous piece of machinery for the production of paper, while a voice painstakingly narrates its function, history, origins and technique. In a symmetrical, complementary arrangement, the final chapter of the exhibition (and perhaps the metaphor for the show itself) is Un paysage de dominos (A Domino Landscape, 2010), a wall decorated with wallpaper of a two-dimensional grid. Within the grid is a sequence of the drawings of Friedrich Fröbel’s ‘Gifts’; these objects, volumes, geometries and mathematical formulas formed the basis of the pedagogues’ interpretive lessons on the natural harmony of the world’s forms. Froment’s work has often referenced the theorist, from whom he seems to have inherited some of his analytical capacities.
Precisely as in Fröbel’s theories, reality (including objects, machines, animals and sounds) is arrayed like a table of multiple primary elements, separated and compartmentalized, while the space between the parts is revealed to the viewer as a place of potential, of misunderstanding, of infinite possible combinations and interpretations.
Translated by Stephen Piccolo
Francesco Garutti
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