Pate à papier, 2018 Performance avec Artist Commons à Cunst-link
Alix Nicolas' practice delves into one pivotal medium: paper. Questioning paper as a material in itself, more than a mere support, she manages to transform it into sculptural forms and environmental elements. With Le Songe d'Octavien, Alix Nicolas adapts her work Papier, a serie of environmental interventions consiting in wrapping surfaces with paper paste. For this exhibition, she decides to envelop not only the space but also the human body, collaborating with performers from the Artist Commons and together exploring the possible relationship between this material, the body and its movements.
She took Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompéi, a book by the french author Théophile Gautier as a subtext for the show.
The book tells the story of Octavien, who visiting Pompeii, comes across a molding of a beautiful woman and fell in love with her imprints.
What traces has the human being left through time? The imprint of a body, letters on a paper? These traces are representative of beings fragility and at the same time, symbolise human's strenght to survive against ephemerality.
Literature and history, archives and traces, are the thematics united in this exhibition. Similar to Octavien following Arria Marcella's path in the pre-Vesuvio Pompeii, the visitor here is invited to observe the passage of time, while human beings disapear under paper matter. Dream as a subtle frontier between fiction and reality, just like literature and perfomance, is the place observing and reactivating the past and building bridges towards forgotten histories and people.
Théophile Gautier survives through his novels and books, and within the shapes of Pompeii people remained thanks to the solidification of lava. Exploring these ideas, Alix Nicolas proposed performers to embrace paper, and to mould the matter. On four metal shelves, she exhibits the artwork Collection S, a well-arranged selection of blocks made from different types of paper (used for the drawing) with various sizes and weights. The installation subtly questions with humour both the processes of art making and collecting. For the occasion, Collection S can be read as a way to remember paper-objects by classifying them, as would the archeologist in his laboratory.
