Ce qui nous échappe

With Ce qui nous échappe, Pauline Cordier and Rahel Oberhummer inhabit Espace ContreContre through a thematic and spatial dialogue around water, our relationship to the living world, and human attempts to control both organic and mineral realms. Rahel Oberhummer’s glass sculptures, vertical elements positioned at the centre of the space, resonate with Pauline Cordier’s floor drawing, which unfolds across the entire surface of the venue. Together, these elements are immersed in a yellowish light that alters the perception of both the works and their surroundings, establishing within the space a form of warning that is at once diffuse and silent.

Emerging from Rahel Oberhummer’s research on the crown-of-thorns starfish — a species now considered invasive, yet once involved in coral regeneration before human intervention disrupted this balance — the two sculptures draw inspiration from tools devised to regulate the proliferation of these organisms. Entitled Disarmed, the works carry a double symbolic charge, rooted in instruments that operate simultaneously within the registers of weaponry and care: bile-salt injectors designed to kill in the name of ecosystem preservation. Through the formal accumulation and layering of these tools, the sculptures assume poetic, hybrid and ambivalent forms. At an almost human scale, these vertical elements appear to float within the space and engage in dialogue with the presence of visitors. They foreground an ecology of contradiction in which gestures of care and destruction overlap, revealing both the complexity of our relationship to the living world and the paradoxes of an era attempting to repair what it has first disrupted.

These new poetic and organic species resonate with Devenir Trace, Pauline Cordier’s installation, which takes shape from cartographic research into the presence and evolution of water in Saint-Maurice and its surrounding area. A drawing unfolds across the floor of the space, a kind of precarious map whose pattern is based on hydrological data gathered, layered and cross-referenced by the artist. Created from a heterogeneous sedimentary material deposited on a pale ground, this deliberately fragile surface interrogates trace and transformation while spatially and symbolically connecting each element of the exhibition. With each passage of visitors, it alters and transforms, progressively modifying the initial drawing and producing an increasingly abstract, organic and fluid pattern. Alteration thus becomes the very condition of the work: its movement, temporality and memory. Further completed by a filtered, coloured light conceived by Pauline Cordier, Silencieusement immerses each viewer in a distinctive atmosphere through a gesture of transformation akin to a slow yet profound mutation.

Conceived in close resonance, the works of Rahel Oberhummer and Pauline Cordier respond to one another within the large hall of Espace ContreContre through a dialogue that is at once sensitive and raw, imbued with both fragility and force, materially as much as symbolically. Although water is strongly evoked throughout the exhibition, the significance and agency of matter equally connect the respective practices of the two artists. Matter becomes a central element of the creative process — through its properties, potentials and reactions — giving formal, artistic and poetic materiality to Ce qui nous échappe.

Maéva Besse