ART CITIES: Paris-Julien Discrit & Cyrielle Gulacsy

Julien Discrit’s work is governed by the discrete and the continuous. More specifically, the artist exploits the concept of the fragment as a symbol of the continuities and discontinuities that dominate the relationship between the human being and the surrounding world, namely the non-human as expressed by the anthropologist Philippe Descola. His thinking is also driven by geography, which the artist uses to “describe the world” as well as to approach the relationship between the visible and the hidden.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou Archive

At a time when the concept of nature has perhaps never been invoked so much in the field of visual arts, acting both as an embarrassing notion that should be overcome, and as an added value that should be claim, the exhibition “Rerun Nature” present the new works of Julien Discrit initiated in early 2022 with the “Aftertouch” series as well as works on canvas and on paper by Cyrielle Gulacsy around the theme of light, produced specifically for the exhibition. The conceptual rapprochement between their work is to be sought first of all in their common interest for astrophysics, nuclear physics, geography or even Earth sciences… Indeed, in both cases, this attraction contributes to the elaboration of an artistic approach and practice seen first as research. Through the attention they pay to the world, through the production of knowledge they derive from it, and the images they reveal of it, the sciences provide an experimental, theoretical and aesthetic framework for their work. However, Cyrielle Gulacsy and Julien Discrit do not fail to question this framework, juxtaposing scientific observation and personal perception, thus playing on this gap, both tiny and abysmal, which builds our fragile knowledge of the world. But it is indeed in the very title of the exhibition that we could both find “a way of doing things” common to the two artists, and a singular reading of the concept of Nature. Born from an automatic text correction (algorithmic one might say), the latter takes the title of the famous work of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, and hijacks it involuntarily to extract a new meaning. We could indeed say that in this exhibition, and as computer language suggests, it is a question of “executing the program” (Run>Nature). Each of the two artists in this case seems to make use of a process whose starting point is a kind of radical unity of matter, to then use all of its physical characteristics, its combinatorial properties. If Nature “tends to balance” one could just as well say that it “tends to compose”. Yet it is here that it participates in the technique: in this permanent combination and this materiality that Cyrielle Gulacsy and Julien Discrit have decided to explore. Drawing on scientific and spatial imagery, the series of paintings entitled “Light Diffusion” presents large expanses whose luminous impression is rendered by a myriad of colored dots. If the relationship seems established at first glance, this emblematic technique of Cyrielle Gulacsy’s work is not strictly speaking “pointillist”. On the contrary, we should take up the filiation that the title of the exhibition suggests: that of the Greek Phusis going from Democritus to Lucretius (who, well beyond our concept of nature, describes the world as an inclusive totality), and perhaps speak here of an “atomistic” painting. It is indeed by the juxtaposition and the intricacy of these indivisible elements, produced by these innumerable brushstrokes, that the artist offers us the experience of the passage from white light to visible light, of which the painting is intended to be expression. Through these dots of color she lets us see the dawn, a world made of matter and emptiness, a world where everything, living or inert, is made of the same corpuscular fabric.

For the artist, Rerun is also about re-broadcasting, re-transmitting information, as in the work 24 hours, “Sun H-Alpha” which presents twenty-four views of the Sun, produced using this same repetition system. No color here other than the black of the ink and the white of the paper, but an image which thereby takes on the disturbing aspect of a swarming and vibrating sphere, which could just as well be the solar star as the heart. of an atom. The emitted light is therefore always represented in the form of points. Whether they are the size of a particle or a celestial object, they reveal an aspect of the world that is inaccessible to us. The void becomes almost palpable and taking shape, brings us closer to the nature of things, as much as natural things. The works presented by Julien Discrit, if they were initiated recently, are nevertheless part of the continuity of a work developed for several years, and which takes as a starting point processes that could be described as “natural”. More concretely it is a question of considering the work of nature (or let us say rather of the Earth) as a set of technical processes, which the artist can seize to create his own forms. “ReRun Nature”, in this case, would therefore mean here “replaying” Nature: not representing or even reproducing but “using it”. It is, for example, erosion and geomorphological forces that were at the origin of his series of sculptures entitled Pensées, the result of the work of water in a bed of silica. It is still fossilization, as a molding process, that guided his work on the Stones series. Finally, it is the principles of crystallization and arborescence that are at work today in the new series of paintings entitled “Aftertouch”, presented in the exhibition. If their appearance seems to be the product of a slow and meticulous work of repetition, like that of Cyrielle Gulacsy, one could say on the contrary that their genesis is the result of a kind of dazzling, that the similarity with forms flash seems to emphasize. Because the forms that we observe on the surface of the canvas, evoking all at once a plant, neuronal network or even an expanding organism are the result of a fleeting contact. Through their respective works, Cyrielle Gulacsy and Julien Discrit offer us in Rerun Nature an enlarged vision of nature at work and thereby seem to subscribe to this enigmatic note of Marcel Duchamp which enjoins the artist not to “to speak of”, but indeed “to speak with”.

Photo: Left & Right: Julien Discrit, from the series “Aftertouch”, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, Titled, dated, signed on the back, © Julien Discrit, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou

Info: Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, 45 rue Chapon, Paris, Duration: 3/9-29/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.annesarahbenichou.com/