The notion of group, of ensemble and the place of the individuality within it, here is the common denominator of the works of Matthieu Exposito and Manuèle Bernardi. Their questionings around this theme, even if complementary, follow two different ways.
Manuèle Bernardi, with her sculptures of butterflies or jellyfishes, points out more a dense group which builds itself by the meeting of individuals and their proximity : the group finds its unity by the accumulation. The animal nature illustrates perfectly what can seem to us paradoxical: united groups where the harmony and the strength proceed of the interdependence between the plural and the singular.
The use of the wax and the paper for the elaboration of the works confirms this fragile balance: just like an ecosystem, their instinct of survival is attentive to the temperature variations. The Callipygia women in terra cotta or bronze of the artist proceed of the same association between strength and lightness. If those ones are firmly and vastly rooted in earth by their hips, legs and feet, the more their flesh reaches the sky, the more they become clearer and thinner in a slight bust.
Matthieu Exposito, as for him, illustrates by his monumental architectures crushing a crowd of repeated and geometrical modules –anonymous units, in some ways- the human solitude and its dead-end. The urban horizon is black or white, its inhabitants sharp as per its image. Some pink lines or patches, delicate, frame or fill a minimal and indestructible material by small accents of pink, like a fragile organic skin.
These lines or colored patches never meet, and do not wrap totally the structure around wich they spread. They don’ t see either their fellow men or their group, and even if it was the case, insuperable obstacles separate them for ever. The pinks seem doomed to failure of the meeting, and, nevertheless, their accents breath a draft of hope, a tenuous but essential hope, in this sad geography.
Axel Sourrisseau
Pluriels Singuliers
Manuèle Bernardi and Matthieu Exposito
Exhibition January 23rd - March 14th