Architexture

The first visual conversation of the Architexture exhibition takes place between Ernesto and the duo Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout. Its subtitle, "Ritual," evokes the repetitive gesture, the passion for the act, and the full bodily engagement of the artist in relation to space and time.

Ernesto presents a series of large-format ink works, composed with obsessive precision using AutoCAD, the architectural software. He explores variations of a single drawing, complicating its structure as the viewer moves through the gallery spaces. Starting from the most essential, he reaches the densest at the end of the journey. The multitude of intertwined forms creates the fabric of the canvases, then Ernesto overlays and colors—or discolors—these points and the drawing.

The form is born at the tip of his stylus. This new way of painting leaves nothing to chance or to any potential AI. The complex composition is mastered by the artist as the fulfillment of the gesture linked to thought, to abstraction, until the work appears clear and bare, giving a sense of lightness to the soul of whoever contemplates it.

Distortion, photographic kaleidoscope: the work of Bastien Pourtout and Edouard Taufenbach defies the logic of perception.

Ernesto builds worlds from the digital grid, while Bastien and Edouard deconstruct them to weave their own garden. A garden that matches their creative madness as a duo, a garden where one can experience the desire of the other, where one feels that this world is but the shore of another, much freer and more whimsical. On the other side of the mirror, in the realm of artificial paradises where the foliage of a tree, even in a photograph, would remain in motion. From a neatly trimmed hedge, the artist-players create an infinite pattern where the gaze is lost. Under hypnosis, one begins to dream of the thrill felt in the labyrinth of a maze from which one does not know if one will ever escape, even if one so desired to enter. This vertigo attracts the daring, those who seek, around the corner of a hedge, the one who will appear and change everything. No more up, no more down, no more agreement or disagreement. The freedom of the gesture, the freedom of play. Is this the promise of a joyful liberation that drives these two artists to embark on the journey into the labyrinth? The dialogue with Ernesto's works proves fascinating; one can speak of a reading grid, a fabric, ethics, rigor and aesthetics, dreams and meditation. Like two sides of the same coin. The Taufenbach-Pourtout duo and artist Mistretta work the texture, build the dazzle, masters of Architexture.

Josephine Flasseur, Exhibition Curator