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Exhibition

Uhhh.. Ok ! - off-site

Solo show by Aurélien Potier at Belsunce Projects.

A partnership between Belsunce Projects and Triangle-Astérides

January 10-26, 2020, public opening and performance with Hugo Mir-Valette on January 10, 6PM-11PM.
Belsunce Projects, 15 street Puvis de Chavannes 13001 Marseille

Aurélien Potier comes from figurative painting, photorealistic according to his own words. A slow, meditative inner process, from which Aurélien moves away in favor of more immediacy in his recent works.

Aurélien’s work is based on different temporalities: nervous drawings, directly on canvas or paper, which break the order of his typewritten texts, pasted on the walls. He tirelessly intervenes on these prints, rewriting the same words, the same phrases. The apparent speed of execution of his recent works contrasts with a sensual and haptic video. On the verge of science fiction, it is another entry into Aurélien Potier’s work. He collaborates with Hugo Mir-Valette’s sound work for this film, as well as for duo performances.

Texts are now an important part of Aurélien Potier’s work. He continuously shapes them, writing words that obsess him, often about himself. He writes about what surrounds him, capturing all emotions, desires, vulnerabilities, and conversations on social media, alternating between French and English. His gaze shifts direction, he is present. He does not hide. His tricks are as simple as that, tricks that come from a simple marker, simple pencils. Tricks that reveal his everyday life, with materials easy to carry, which he takes with him. He looks you in the eye when he speaks, sometimes putting his head into his notebook to read the passage he wrote last night, the year before, or this afternoon. We listen to these raw words, which make us feel the limits of our shells. Words that resonate with the current political climate: “we’re gonna suffocate as usual,” one can read in the stream of consciousness he offers us. Spread throughout the space, the entire complexity of the artist flows through this exhibition, both through the text that overwhelms us and his drawings that appear scribbled, but whose secret practice of copying Michelangelo’s sketches betrays the skill of the gesture.

We perceive his grip. He manipulates and caresses his fragility and anxieties to ask simple questions. He invites us into his reflections and observations on ways of living in a world that constantly rejects.

Text by Belsunce Projects (translated to English).

Aurélien Potier graduated from the Rietveld Academie in 2017. His work has been shown at venues such as the Ness space (Paris, France), de Oude Kerk and SSBA Salon (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Cooper Union (New York, USA), SUB (Çanakkale, Turkey), Sissi Club, and Voiture 14 (Marseille). From September 2019 to February 2020, he was in residence at Triangle France - Astérides, where he focused on preparing his first solo exhibition in Marseille, which opened at Belsunce Projects in January 2020.

Inhabited by a strive to bring together contradictory forces, Aurélien’s work is the fruit of intertwining paradoxes; where fragility gives birth to a language permeated with affects. His work creates perceptive environments that are traversed by disorientation, with a vitality from which emerge written, performed, drawn and sculpted forms. Revendicating the power of vulnerability and affirming the centrality of intimacy, Aurélien powerfully expresses the creative potential of emotional fallibility and instable moments. (text by Camille Ramanana Rahary)