"CONSTELLATIONS" - 16 Rue des Quatre Fils, Paris

RX&SLAG Paris is pleased to present Pascal Convert's second solo exhibition, just one year after "The Voices That Fell Silent." Today, he brings together 14 works – including 8 created specifically for the occasion – to speak to us about current events by turning to the stars, the constellations, to listen to the faint rumble of the world. In doing so, he takes a step back and a certain distance from the streams of information that obscure the understanding of ongoing conflicts. He blends different dimensions (temporal, symbolic, and poetic) through techniques, materials, the importance of color, and his reflection to "rebirth things and address the question of what survives and what leaves a human trace."
 

Shifting the focus
From dramas to faults, to scars. Pascal Convert directs his gaze towards events that impose themselves as cataclysms in the lives of individuals confronted with a madness inseparable from human history. But unlike Goya, who portrayed it directly and starkly in the series of prints "The Disasters of War" (made between 1810 and 1815), Pascal Convert zooms out and shifts the focus. He creates works in which time seems suspended, halted at a moment in history (e.g., "Stumps of Verdun crystallized") or dedicated to a memory (e.g., "Grave for Anna Politkovskaya," "Bark of Stone," "The Voices That Fell Silent #2"). Like an alchemist, the artist transmutes the horrors of conflicts into poetic works that invite us to take time for questions and reflection, far from the pitfalls of passionate reactions.
 

Which constellations?
The title of the exhibition refers to a book Pascal Convert published in 2013 with Grasset, "La Constellation du lion," in which he recounts his childhood, his mother "surrounded by anxiety and in the shadow of a father" who was a great resistance fighter, but also the betrayals and deaths. "With the exhibition, we move from this constellation where the familial and a slice of history intertwine to a constellation in which hyper-current events and a landscape more complex than the mere literality of current journalism intertwine," he points out. Art becomes a filter that operates through distillation, and the artist, the inventor of a new language. "In these works, I pose the question of imagination, Susan Sontag's question: how to imagine the pain of others? Where do we position ourselves to imagine? Close by? Do we understand better? Can we imagine from afar? All of this may seem cryptic, but I wanted an exhibition that is in a polysemic actuality."
 

Palimpsest materials
In this new exhibition, Pascal Convert becomes an archaeologist of memory and superimposes temporalities. Indeed, he reuses glass plates produced between the 1930s and 1970s, like ready-mades on which he intervenes. They become palimpsests and become laden with meaning. He engraves "the monitoring of the last heartbeat of a person" (Pan #2) – on a slab of azure blue Cirey – or of a newborn child (Pan #3) – on a slab of red Boussois. On this latter one, a date is inscribed: April 15, 2019. He won't say more, it's up to each individual to figure out what it corresponds to. In "The Jordan," the biblical river transforms into a scar that crosses the marmorite plate, a black opal glass long used as a tombstone but whose production has ceased. "This river, which separates this interlocking of territories from Lebanon to the Dead Sea through Israel and the West Bank, has become a stream of blood." In "The Voices That Fell Silent #2," he places 13 crystal-blown bells on large cobalt plates, each covering a shard of yellow uranium glass, containing a very low level of uranium. The combination of colors inevitably evokes the Ukrainian flag... The trace remains present with the imprints obtained by graphite rubbing on khachkars from the Djoulfa cemetery (Bark of Stone), these symbolic steles of Armenian culture destroyed by Azerbaijani soldiers. A conflict that leaves the international community indifferent. "I try to create shapes that think, that give us time," he concludes.