Thomas Couderc

Thomas Couderc’s works are vitalist; they overflow with energy that the formats they adopt struggle to contain. Flirting with the derisory, his proposals often manifest in growth, expansion, movement—whether in form or content. The unfinished, exhaustion, or virtual failure are never far off, lying just beyond the frenzied rhythm, the hubris, the symbolic and/or effective energy they deploy or summon. But neither are miracle and poetry, which emerge precisely from this imbalance between the means and energies engaged and the expected goal or result—if these are even clearly defined, which is far from a given.

It is therefore no coincidence that the mascot-sculpture accompanying Pilote 00, an installation he recently presented at Les Ateliers Vortex in Dijon, was a bear, newly named Timothy in homage to Timothy Treadwell, the American environmentalist and bear enthusiast whose fatal destiny was the subject of Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man. Unfinished, suggesting a growth that questions its own completion or purpose, the sculpture was made—ironically—of Frosties cereal boxes and other growth cereals, some vectorized, others re-customized. The installation proper filled the entire cubic volume of the exhibition space, like a misshapen, invasive, and enigmatic matrix. It consisted of an accumulation of discarded everyday objects, collected from scrapyards around the city, joined end to end and deliberately repainted hastily and roughly in white, forming a skeletal, labyrinthine structure that obstructed the visitors’ circulation through the space.

A specific facet of Thomas Couderc’s concerns is expressed in LEPOPEE, a performative protocol developed in collaboration with Teoman Gurgan. Structured like a narrative, LEPOPEE unfolds through performative installations that often evoke travel and leisure, though their realization always demands an energy and labor wildly disproportionate to the stated or expected result. In La mine de vers de terre, created as part of Mulhouse 2012, the challenge was to convince a company to move 100 cubic meters, that is, 32 tons of topsoil into the exhibition space, to dig a three-meter-long tunnel within it, during the run of the show, in order to collect earthworms—symbolically, ultimately—to go fishing with. In Les Vacances d’Automne, part of Riam 09, the two artists uprooted a strawberry tree from the Nîmes region, took it on holiday in a Renault 4L, and parked it in Marseille for the duration of the exhibition. Beyond the parable of uprooting and the sometimes difficult but necessary creation of new roots, the feat lay in keeping it alive through hydroponics. In Dijon, the epic culminated in the somewhat spectacular act of “walking” on saltwater to fish for corn intended for the barbecue celebrating the exploit.

Couderc’s videos, at first glance, seem more unsettling in tone. There is often running—sometimes breathlessly. Most often, they depict dynamic sequences of acceleration, escape, headlong flight, struggle, or pursuit, as in Le Vallon, where the artist’s implied gaze—the invisible lens of the camera—is chased in an improbable hunt, on foot and full of shouts, by a group of extras whose intentions remain unclear.

The suspension of meaning and context—of destination, or even of purpose—behind all this energy expressed and deployed before our eyes returns us to metaphysical questions whose strangeness is, ultimately, only superficial.

In LOVE PROGRESS S01E03, the video presented here, the dialectical tension oscillates between disco elements and a deliberately makeshift boxing ring. From the outset, it establishes a mysterious and suspenseful setting. As always with Couderc, the eye becomes one with the camera, plunging into a stylized, archetypal, and deliberately exaggerated decor, further theatricalized by a soundtrack composed by Simon Kozak. Yet these assumed artifices do not demystify or neutralize the tension of the “romantic-fake” existential thriller that, in Couderc’s own words, is meant to unfold.

Couderc plays—by emphasizing them—with perceptual and narrative chiasms, disproportions, and shifts in scale and context, reaching a climax through the surprising and progressive appearance of those creatures we all carry within us: earthworms. Evasion, offbeat farce, bittersweet parody of existence—how you interpret it is up to you. The sculptural display, both immersive, expansive, and destabilizing, will hold the viewer just long enough for them to form their own opinion.

Text by Emmanuel Lambion
Translation : Triangle-Astérides