The works of Célia Boulesteix and Victor Unwin are porous: the images, forms, and materials they compose with still contain enough void to host the imagination of anyone who might engage with them. The engraved, printed, or transferred images are like free memories, belonging to anyone identifying with them. The materials and forms evoke both distant and familiar spaces and objects. Each work is like a fill-in-the-blank text intentionally left incomplete, or a blue-pencilled document where the hidden parts are tolerated and desired.
Unwin and Boulesteix ground their work in the reassuring coolness of shadows. Against a reality that is too readable, too clear, too smooth, in a system that grants a minimal role to the imagination, both artists advocate for a return to the Platonic cave. There, the distant and flickering light casts blurry forms and vague outlines which, instead of precisely describing reality, invites us to suggest what it could be for us.
However, the works exhibited here do not stem from a form of automatic writing whose keystone would only be found in the artists’ deep unconscious. Célia Boulesteix composes her works like narratives — but these only exist in fragmentary form, resembling heuristic diagrams. In his works, Victor Unwin generates systems of meaning arising from complex protocols — but these also contain an element of unpredictability, like a human pause outside a mathematical equation.
Even in its title, the exhibition “Pig Sole” explores these happy unknowns. Far from partaking in an isolating hermeticism, the work of both artists mobilizes a form of generous symbolism, widening into a constellation of narratives.
–Simon Gérard
