Le jardin qui bascule, Galerie C
2023
« Paradise was not large; perfect, each form only bloomed there once; a garden contained them all. »1
Le jardin qui bascule was exhibited at Galerie C in Paris from April 18 to June 3, 2023. This exhibition is the first collaboration between Galerie C and the artist duo Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout.
This project is first and foremost an attempt to construct a shared space, the very space of our relationship. The garden is this space "between" us, built by our two gazes, shaped by our two bodies, cultivated by our four hands. It is a vast playground and space for exchange, a place where our tastes, curiosities, and ways of seeing and touching the world align and diverge.
These gardens are places of tipping points, chiasms, reversals, and false symmetries.
The exhibition plays with the repetition of forms. The recurrence of the square and the matrix creates passages and paths between the different typologies of works. Shaped, this harmony allows visitors to shape their own intimate and mental garden.
The exhibition presents 25 original works divided into 5 typologies: Hedges, large silver collages made from photographs of foliage — Herbiers d’ombres and Glaneurs, series of performances — Légendes, photomontages between photography and drawing — as well as Swinguing Gardens, the digital extension of this project through a set of NFTs.
1 André Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse, 1891
From large silver prints of plant textures, we create life-size collages. In their realization, these works reveal pictorial and sensitive surfaces through plays of scale and architecture. As in a labyrinth, the drawing that structures the assembly of elements (visible on the back) fades in favor of an immersion conducive to daydreaming. One searches for their way in this plant maze that constantly turns in on itself.
The sheet, stretched in turn by our hands, becomes a screen for projecting plant shadows but also a wall that both masks and reveals our bodies and the landscape. This game of tipping between our two viewpoints creates the framework for an intimate and sensual garden here. Between shadow and light, this series gives form to a photographic game of hide-and-seek where the surrounding nature is outlined in negative.
Légendes are photo-drawing montages that create volume, perspectives, and stories. We use the photogram technique to impress the drawing at the same time as the negative. The result is a cut image where the gaze navigates from one side to the other and constructs a representation greater than the sum of its two parts. Gardens to build, imagine, and dream.
In the series Les Glaneurs, the hand is at the heart of the photographic dialogue. Taking turns, each of us takes 8 Polaroids (one roll) — when one triggers the shot, the other guides the hand positions. The established protocol explores the variability of arrangements within the limits of the square format frame. The images have no left, right, top, or bottom; they flip and reverse. They are organized in a matrix (4X4) that continues and doubles this work of geometric triangulation. Multiplied by the 16 images of the grid, the gestures draw a set of dynamic and articulated lines. They compose repertoires of forms, like alphabets — intimate choreographies of private signs.
Swinging Gardens is a collection of NFTs, the digital extension of the physical exhibition. These are crypto-artworks created from silver photographs or digital videos. Constituted as assemblies that perpetually turn on themselves, they take up the formal vocabulary of boxwood lace or Renaissance garden drawings or 17th-century French gardens.
The Swinging Gardens collection is exhibited and sold on the Foundation platform.
Galerie Spazio Nuovo (Rome), 2025
Paris Photo, Galerie C, 2024
Zona Maco (Mexico), Galerie Almanaque fotográfica, 2024
Galerie C (Paris), 2023, (solo show)
