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Antifer
Solo show of du jour,
from September 26 to November 22, 2024,
at Galerie Panis, Rouen (France). © Fred Margeron.
Cette œuvre devant nous
“Look carefully, what you are going to see is no longer what you have just seen,” professed the great Leonardo da Vinci, both sovereign of geometric exactitude and maestro of illusions. This sentence applies perfectly to the plastic research of Sosthène Baran, not only because the art of glazing or that of Leonardesque sfumato hold no secrets for him, but above all because they are expressed only through ellipses, traps, and other trompe-l’œil.
What we admire at first sight will therefore no longer really be what we contemplate a moment later, once we have noticed, moved, and rearranged all that the artist has left at the disposal of our gaze, if not of our very hands. For his paintings are as much collages of objects, his collages bas-reliefs, his bas-reliefs altarpieces, his altarpieces cabinets of curiosities.
There is thus nothing accidental in his works, so much are they the result of a carefully elaborated work whose skill combines with subtlety. And the more their process and their workmanship fade or become invisible, the more their nature and their expression are revealed and manifested beyond their mysteries and their strangeness. However, nothing here forms a system, in the sense that everything should break with its origin in order to structure itself autonomously and independently. On the contrary, everything is connected by a fine network of threads as tenuous as they are strong, of in-betweens as eloquent as presences, of mechanisms as ingenious as sleights of hand.
“Art exists, remains in its history for the same reason that the work is always before us. Exercise of a desire which does not lack objects, but which each time misses its object, turning back too late, turning aside too soon. It is for this reason that I can at the same time remember and live, be memory and innocence, walk in the step of time, ceaselessly crossing the space of reminiscence and mirage where meaning shines and recedes,” declared Gaëtan Picon in his essay “Admirable Tremor of Time.”
With Sosthène Baran, space and time are superimposed, associated and fused, even reversed, so as better to metamorphose images into apparitions without origin or predetermined destiny. One could almost affirm here that reality does not exist, for as soon as it appears before us, it is already caught in the interlacing of present and past, of vision and of its memory.
There is therefore no more reality here than there is waiting, hope, or desire for, by, and through a real considered as a territory of possibilities. Thus the artist tirelessly surveys it in search of a few nuggets of the marvelous or the extraordinary inserted in the gangue of the everyday and the ordinary. And, as an entomologist this time, he never ceases to observe and analyze them in order to grasp all their faculties and potentialities, then to put them into operation in every sense of the term.
What is born under our dazzled eyes is therefore only the result of a process of preliminary rebirth between his magician’s fingers of figures and forms: what seems to us a creation of today reveals itself as a fragment of history, a sculpture carefully shaped found object — and vice versa! What one finds there is only what is found again…
It is not by chance either that, for this exhibition, he started—contrary to what might have been expected—from black backgrounds in order to make the lights spring forth more vividly. Did not Paul Claudel emphasize: “There are eyes that receive light and there are eyes that give it.”. With Sosthène Baran, the raw diamonds of reality, recut by his hand and then set in the heart of his own landscape of plastic experimentations, shine with all their brilliance. And their gleams have not yet finished illuminating the depth of our nights and the clarity of our days.
Marc Donnadieu