Révolution — duo show with Germain Marguillard

A revolution is a circular motion, a closed curve orbiting around a point that appears successively as star, planet and atom. As much spatial as temporal, this cyclical trajectory also induces a cadence: a time that begins where another ends. Nourished by mythological, religious and scientific narratives and forms, the works of Margot Anquez and Germain Marguillard invite us to observe the semantic contours of this universal principle.

Placed in soil and irrigated by water through pipes, Margot Anquez's sculptures seem to approach this movement through its cyclical nature. By handling the ingredients of a primordial silt, she attempts to breathe plant life into the heart of her artefacts, inscribing them in the cycle that rhythms the life of organic bodies: birth-growth-maturity-decline-death. She places us in the presence of a curious edifice, an earth mausoleum whose contours evoke at once a construction forged by nature and a human fabrication. Her ceramic sculptures, whether placed in basins or linked by artificial arteries, appear as fragments of a single growing organism. Modelled in white clay, some of them hybridise forms of floral and human reproductive organs, male and female. These ornaments seem chosen for their votive properties, with the intention of making these forms fertile. Other sculptures, this time modelled in black stoneware, form a dark bark whose epidermis recalls both a rocky surface and shreds of body. These are covered with nipple shapes from which water springs before flowing into basins. In the manner of a stele, they pay homage to goddesses and saints such as Saint Julia of Corsica, martyr with mutilated breasts whose spring is said to ensure fertility for women. Here the flesh of the saint resembles the earth's crust, holding within its breast the groundwater that ensures human life. Through these fertile correspondences, Margot Anquez's work seems to invite us to imagine a future in which the borders between nature and culture, man and woman, body and spirit would be troubled.

By bringing together forms relating to the quest for understanding this movement, both at the scale of the particle and that of the planets, Germain Marguillard's works further examine this rotation through the existential questions it raises. The quantum windows, for instance, lend symbolic weight to these trajectories by integrating their mathematical representations into panels resembling stained glass. Germain Marguillard thus plunges us into an atmosphere where scientific research borders on the mystical. He presents us with objects that simultaneously recall mechanical and architectural forms, drawn from fabrications at once futuristic and archaic. On the surface of these caissons, the ceramic ornamental forms appear no less functional, and their mineral texture troubles the temporal space to which they belong. Drawing on the forms of particle accelerators — technologies used to study the elementary particles that compose our universe — these sculptures paradoxically take on symbolic ornaments tied to alchemical cosmogony. The twelve rose windows that dress the first monolith unfold in a series of starred polygons figuring the cyclical nature of our universe: from the point symbolising primordial chaos before the big bang, to the circle signifying infinity. The bas-reliefs that close the ends of these caissons are inspired by drawings by Ernst Haeckel, the 19th-century German biologist and philosopher who devoted his life to uncovering the laws that govern nature, through an approach as scientific as it was spiritual. By relating research on the essence of matter across these contradictory fields, Germain Marguillard's sculptures seem to question our relationship to scientific knowledge and the vision of the world it conveys. They urge us to set aside our certainties, in an era when increasingly developed technologies paradoxically bring to light troubled zones they cannot illuminate.