As
a body of work, Floryan Varennes’s sculptures and installations,
with their remarkable formal perfection, present a strange sparring
between fascination and repulsion, between the absence of bodies and
an imposing physical presence due the preciosity
of their materials, their modes of presentation and the symbols they
summon. Often involving combat weapons, surgical instruments or
coercive repression equipment, his works fully engage in a subjective
representation of violence. Not in order to explicitly condemn it,
but more to consider its integration into the body as a life
discipline, a way of learning to live with it so as to either better
defend oneself against it, or build something out of the suffering it
causes physically or psychologically. Armor and shields appear
alongside scalpels and muzzles, but there is also lavender, a neck
brace, fabrics and other soft materials, as if to appease and thwart
the torture evoked by the cold, metallic torments of many of his
creations. These therefore represent a kind of self-healing that
could, when all is said and done, become the existential condition of
the contemporary living being, subject to the most perfidious
brutalities, those that make no noise, that do not say their name,
being no one’s doing: a floating, lasting impression with no
notable origin.
The
transparency at work in Floryan Varennes’s creations could thus
signify the disincarnate, diaphanous violence paradoxically suffered
by all of today’s bodies in the post-democratic regime. If war is
no longer the frontal one
of
the Middle Ages – from which the artist draws a significant number of
his theoretical, historical and symbolic references -, it is indeed
present through the everyday use of our modern media devices, our
technological communication tools, through dehumanised work, and
through divided human / animal / vegetable relations. But then how
can a form, a presence be given to that violence ? Maybe by
approaching it through its opposite, namely the notion of care,
particularly when his works are made out of therapeutic accessories
known to help life to triumph, for better or for worse.
Care
is precisely what the artist has been focusing on lately, especially
following his recent residency in a hospital environment, hence the
vulnerability of bodies and things, as shown by his recurrent use of
glass, lavender, textiles… But if he makes use of the notion of
care, which is much perverted nowadays, it is not a matter of
negating or suppressing the
pain,
without which there would be no need to take care.
In
his methods of representation, Floryan Varennes prefers to highlight
the fact that violence and “taking care” remain the two sides of
one same reality. His research is generally situated between two
concepts, letting this in-between play out within his works. Between
revisited medievalism and retrofuturist style, disinhibited
sexuality
and sacredness, with Floryan Varennes we watch a Queer
Fantasy
that evokes a suspended temporality in which the place of violence
and love, and the way these two terms meet inside the body and on its
surface, remain to be negotiated.
During
his residency at Lindre-Basse, Floryan Varennes has created new glass
pieces in partnership with the Centre International d’Art Verrier
in Meisenthal, which he will present at his end-of-residency event.
To these will be added other experimental creations and installations
made in the studio with the aim of extending his vocabulary towards
an idiosyncratic view of care,
within a world currently on the way to re-mystification.
Partnership
Parc Naturel Régional de Lorraine & Centre International d’Art
Verrier de Meisenthal / France