Exhibition from Thursday, February 11 to Friday, March 18

Paul Mouginot offers a freshness and a new look at the things that surround him, in a hanging of photos bordered by two wise men, guardian statues of this exhibition. Paul appears here as a visual poet, who shows in his work the poetic and sensory dimensions of memory, where he highlights, a memory, his investigation of things, places.

For MEMORIES / NEXT LEVEL, Paul Mouginot exhibits his pieces sparingly and precisely: 6 photos, 2 sculptures, an installation. Paul has a singular process: he observes his subject, advances in the contemplation of the memory, dissects it, extracts it, and restores it layer by layer. Large ensembles or details, sharp or blurred, these elements with distinct color and textual codes are the quintessence, the sensitive. He never stops getting closer to his subject: he frames it, he chooses it, he constructs it, he stages it, he superimposes colors and materials. The choice of paper, the framing, complete the embedding of these relics.

Photographs BLUE The sea, the blue of the sky, the counter-sky, the blur, the wind. We contemplate the dead calm, the vertigo, the void, the beyond the horizon line. This image refers to 3 photos from his previous series RENÉ (2013): first memory of the sea, memory of the mountains and shades of blue – and recurring nightmare of childhood. Everything is clear in this photo, except the blurred transition between the hues; Paul refers to the pictorial work of Rothko.

YELLOW By photographing the surface gilded with fine gold of his JERICHOR lamp, exhibited at the FIAC in 2015, Paul tries to ensure a form of sustainability of his work. The photograph then becomes a “time capsule”, an additional insurance against inevitable oblivion.

GREEN Paul recounts that as a child, he often cut himself with blades of grass; here he explores the superimposition of four photographs taken in the fields of Giverny, allowing him to find and reconstruct this touching memory. The superimposed blades of grass draw oblique lines that seem to blur the vision. The very marked geometric shapes that crisscross the first photographic layer are then disrupted and the reading of the landscape becomes altered, leaving room for a freer interpretation.

RED From afar, the photo sketches two perfectly interlocking shapes and clearly demarcated by a more or less intense shade of red. You have to get closer to see the imperfections, stains or cracks, which come to animate this apparent limpidity. Pink, roses, marshmallow, crepe paper from the acidulous boxes… BLACK Blurry photograph of a photograph of a small bronze lion, which belonged to his grandfather: the memory fades, the shapes fade, but the general idea remains.

WHITE The brain, seat of memory, can be the location of the solution or the promises of the future.

Sculptures and installations For Paul, drawing on memories cannot be an end in itself. For him, photography is a pretext, a way to be a chameleon, to enter everywhere, to see and absorb what surrounds him, to feed his own existential quest and whistle to a higher state of consciousness.

LIFE’S BAGGAGE Two reinforced concrete statues, on two plexiglass bases, connected by a golden chain evoke surpassing oneself, the passage from the personal to the general, the projection of private life to public life, the exit from the body.

TIME RIBBON A paper ribbon on which he writes “every day, every night, every day…”, like a haunting litany, which materializes the painful time, but also the seconds that heal, the stubborn fight against erasure. This ribbon connects the two BLACK and WHITE photos arranged face to face. Connected by time, they seem to never stop moving away from each other, until they burst, in a white space that evokes a holy of holies.

GÉRALDINE POSTEL