TEMPO: Chapter 2 : “Pourquoi n’y a-t-il rien ici alors qu’il devrait y avoir quelque chose?”

Chapitre 2 : Why is there nothing where there should be something?

Hélène Caiazzo, Jade Lièvre, Brice Robert, Frederic Storup

11 January – 31 January 2025  

Opening Saturday 11 January ; 6 pm – 9 pm

“Why is there something where there should be nothing? Why is there nothing where there should be something?” These questions, posed by Mark Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie, serve as a lens through which various artistic practices are explored, brought together in a shared space: that of Les Ateliers. These places where such questions might briefly cross the minds of artists as they confront their practices, alone, before leaving their individual spaces to meet other inhabitants of this shared environment. In the common areas, around a coffee, a lunch, a game of billiards, or a simple break, exchanges of materials and ideas come to life, fueling a constant dialogue between individuality and collectivity.

Back in their respective studios, the artists shape unique and autonomous visual universes. Yet, the gestures, rhythms, and routines of each leave a subtle mark on this collective space, weaving sensitive resonances through their daily lives. This exhibition highlights the richness of radically different practices while celebrating what emerges from the sharing of a common creative space.

Following the first chapter presented at In extenso last December, with works by Iroise Doublet, Victor Gény, Théo Levillain, Leo Reichling, and Kolja Venturi, this second chapter – Why is there nothing here when there should be something? – brings together four more artists – Hélène Caiazzo, Jade Lievre, Brice Robert, and Frederic Storup – who also passed through the spaces of Les Ateliers in 2024. While their practices are aesthetically distinct, the “nothing” expressed in the title question resonates strangely, far from any pejorative connotation. The motif of the façade – also to be understood as that of artifice or illusion – first emerges in an architectural landscape emptied of its occupants.

In the paintings of Brice Robert, we are literally confronted with façades – those of suburban houses, factories, and mundane architecture. Painted with meticulous and laborious brushstrokes, these works do not merely reveal a narrative through their motifs: the very gestures of painting tell a story of repetitiveness, a mechanical rhythm that echoes the routine of a worker living in a suburban house, waking at dawn (as the light suggests), leaving home to work in an industrial environment, and returning home afterward. Through these compositions, Brice sheds light on a social reality marked by monotony and constancy, subtly questioning the conditions of life and work. The monumental scale of his works neither venerates nor romanticizes the banal, but reveals it with a raw honesty, just as it is.

Another type of façade — that of false pretense — is evoked in the works of Hélène Caiazzo, which together create the disillusioned portrait of a character or a world that is both sad and humorous, drawn from a universe of neuroses, illustrating the title of the piece (Névrotica). In this suspended moment – the morning after a party? the night before? – in an intimate space, an assumed clumsiness merges with the ceramist’s technique, creating a vanitas rich with symbolism: sinful serpents coil around a defective mirror, reflecting the fragility inherent in beauty; an empty chalice and a full ashtray evoke both celebration and despair; a seashell does not even try to hide its suggestive form, placed beside a ceramic dildo; a scene where scattered flowers remind us of the withering passage of time. The very fragility of ceramics, a material often associated with delicacy, here seems to underscore the underlying tragedy, yet made almost ridiculous by its pop form and lightness.

Frédéric Storup invites us to uncover what lies behind the façade by exploring the tension between the material and the immaterial, gesture and absence, the visible and the invisible. The pieces presented here stem from his experience as a rope access technician, working on bell towers to replace wooden louver boards with fiberglass replicas, less radio-absorbent and painted with hand-crafted wood patterns. This work, linked to the installation of telecommunications antennas in these bell towers, led him to discover faux-brick chimneys that also conceal antennas using wave-transparent materials. In his installation, the modular structure made from reclaimed aluminum acts as a conductive network for fictitious signals, with LEDs, like nightlights, bearing witness to an invisible yet ongoing activity. Making the intangible visible is thus at the core of his practice.

In the basement, artifice takes center stage in a campy ensemble swaying to the rhythm of ABBA and others, drowning in distraction—destiny, love, anything to escape the “nothing.” Jade Lièvre’s multifaceted video installation, Devenir chienne ou être chien, explores love and its domestication—how it’s taught and perceived within society’s heteronormative, constraining frameworks, and the anxieties this creates. The domesticated dog, cherished as the nuclear family’s convenient beloved, becomes a metaphor for the imbalance in love relationships. The film juxtaposes this with a character desperately seeking destiny through horoscopes and astrology charts, embodying the tension between yearning and disillusionment. It feels like a cathartic karaoke night post-breakup—belting out heartbreak anthems to mend the soul—until the illusion shatters, and you realize it’s also a faux semblant. The lyrics scrolling by aren’t Kelly Rowland and Nelly’s Dilemma or Bonnie Tyler’s heartbreak anthems but a text written by the artist, dissecting the conditioning of love and the possible illusion of its unconditionality.

BIOS

Hélène Caiazzo lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand. She graduated from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design d’Angers in 2017. A self-taught practitioner of wheel-throwing, she bridges the gap between sculpture and craftsmanship by creating “domestic sculptures” and “sculptural objects.” She borrows images from art history, anthropology, archaeology, and craft to question the status of objects and the narratives attached to them, crafting symbolic stories imbued with the idea of artifacts and illusion.

Jade Lièvre, born in Quimper in 1996, currently lives and works in Nantes and graduated from ESACM in 2020. Her work is characterized by the use of simple and low-cost materials and techniques. She creates costumes and sets, starring in films that stage love, emotions, and fragility as dissidence and legitimate, powerful tools for action and revolution. Her work reflects her feminist and queer political commitments, as well as her personal explorations of love, norms, power, and desire.

Brice Robert, born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1986, also lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand. He graduated from EESAB Brest in 2012. Through figurative painting, he highlights the banality of a familiar, unembellished environment, imbuing it with existential depth. By elevating the ordinary to the extraordinary, he rejects the allure of extravagance, lyricism, or picturesque elements that might re-enchant it. His work was recently featured in the group show Dans les temps at Stems Gallery, Brussels, and he was awarded the Emmanuèle Bernheim Grants from the Vendredi Soir Endowment Fund, Paris 2024.

Frédéric Storup, born in Le Thoronet in 1997, graduated from ESACM in 2020 and lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand. He enjoys constructing mechanisms and systems that sometimes self-destruct or serve as mere details within larger chain reactions. He plays with tangible, empirical phenomena such as balance, tides, and the revolution of celestial bodies. From module to module, like neural connections, information flows like a rolling snowball. These pieces swarm and evolve, creating new meaning with each activation, drawing inspiration from both mechanical systems and living organisms. He invites audiences to engage in absurd, futile, and humorous experiences, underscoring his meticulous attention to the craftsmanship of every gear. (Excerpt from a text written by Co.co.)