Artists: Anna Solal and Pierre Unal Brunet
Exhibition title: Intrication
Curated by: Marine Rochard
Venue: CCC OD, Le Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours, France
Date: April 26 – October 6, 2024
Photography: ©Aurélien Mole / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and CCC OD, Tours
Anna Solal and Pierre Unal-Brunet are both interested to some extent in science fiction and literary forms perched on the crest where fantasy takes root in reality. There is also a pronounced taste in her for more poetic writing, sometimes tinged with nebulous romanticism; while in his case, the attachment to nature and curiosity about the unexpected forms that life takes are predominant. Their interests and “wild thoughts” complemented and enriched each other even more than they spoke to each other, as when two friends who didn’t know each other began a long conversation. These literary and theoretical sources should not, however, obscure the fact that their respective works are extremely physical, rooted in a reality that is both concrete and augmented.
For each of them, the process begins with finding and gathering materials, veritable “gifts of chance” – out-of-use objects and cheap standardised products in the case of Anna Solal, and rather natural and organic elements in the case of Pierre Unal-Brunet. Like primordial ingredients, they are then assembled – as if by play, one might think, as the artists interweave the symbolic and usage values associated with them.
The aesthetics are very different, but both echo the craft practices of goldsmiths and weavers, for example. The resulting protean pieces – paintings, sculptures, objects – blur the boundaries between genres: we hesitate to speak of arte povera or rather art brut, just as we fail to describe with any certainty what we are seeing, so porous are the boundaries between humans, animals, plants and products. Often archetypal or even archaic in appearance, the works constitute a kind of unknown folk bestiary that challenges the order of things. With their rare singularity, they are reminiscent of relics emanating from a temporal and spatial otherness in perpetual motion between past, present and future. Contaminating the exhibition space like an expanding body, these works are places of intercession between self and other, between reality and chimera. The exhibition then becomes a place for ‘confabulating’ in an ‘erratic’ way, or, in the words of Pierre Unal-Brunet, an invitation to ‘inhabit blurred zones through spasmodic, convulsive, jerky wanderings’. Anna Solal and Pierre Unal-Brunet show us how to poach at the edges, in a hybrid space that we shape, that we make our own, in a place analogous to the threshold, an inside-outside in equilibrium between two states, a zone of renewed crystallisation of the possible. Between confluences and interferences, the linking of their work is envisaged as the arrangement of a “sympathetic magic”, a conjunction between two worlds possibly conducive to reciprocal acculturation.
-Marine Rochard
