LE MONDE FLUIDE DES FORMES *

Le Monde Fluide des Formes (The Fluid World of Forms) exhibition brings together a selection of video works by Muriel Toulemonde, made between 2001 and 2011. The title attempts to take into account two essential and intrinsically connected dimensions of the artist’s work: the observation of flow and the study of movement. The selection of works, carried out over a ten-year work period, intends to make both the permanent presence of these themes in the artist’s field of experimentation and the evolution that inevitably plays a part in it perceptible.

In the earliest videos, such as Fabeltier (2000) and Atalante (2004), time and movement are fundamentally embodied by the figure, be it human or animal. The video medium allows the trajectory of a body tested by a more or less constraining movement to be fixed in time. It can then isolate and dilute this physical performance in a singular temporality, detached from the inexorable flow of things.

La Théorie des Vagues (The Theory of Waves) (2011) approaches movement in a more structural way. This film, entirely shot in a laboratory of fluid mechanics, resembles a long cavalcade. Body and wave, which together make a single object, are carried along by the rhythm of the bellows mechanism in the wave pool. During this crossing, the representation of the waves’ movement, approached through the prism of different languages, slowly progresses towards an abstract form of undulation, towards a simple sinusoid line.

Hence, the spectator of Le Monde Fluide des Formes, an exhibition on display at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, will be invited to undergo the experience of flow in the Arena gallery space, the experience of an image that doesn’t settle and yet remains. To quote Philippe Dubois, the spectator will be able to perceive and receive not an image object, but ‘an image-state, which is to say a form that thinks’.

* Le Monde Fluide des Formes: The Fluid World of Forms.

www.murieltoulemonde.com