Magma, the First Solo Exhibition of the French Artist in Brasilia
Magma is the first solo exhibition of the French artist in Brasília. The exhibition brings together recent works that highlight the artist’s exploration of the metamorphoses of matter and hybrid systems between geometric and organic, natural and artificial.
With magma, the works share the mineral substance, a field of matter that Dumesnil has explored over the years. This mysterious material, the site of subterranean alchemies and the matrix of the earthly world, has an inherent viscosity, between liquid and solid state, not fitting into a single category.
The formal inscription of the works in the movements of geometric and minimalist abstraction camouflages the complex and deliberately unpredictable character of the production process implemented by the artist.
In the Labyrinth series, produced since 2015, Dumesnil replicates in raw clay and other minerals compositions generated by algorithms influenced by climatic variations. By allowing the matter and natural processes (heat, gravity, humidity, magnetism…) to act within the ‘frame’ created by him, the artist questions both the essence of his own gesture and its inscription in a larger ecosystem and the way we inventory the world.
Observing the random cracks in the clay and the mineral slides on the vegetable fiber, we are invited to retrieve an ‘ecological memory’ and to reflect on the deliberate loss of control that occurs in these earthy layers. In a world where opinions and ideas seem to harden into a simplistic dualism, the symbolic and material qualities of magma, its density, and its fluid character can serve as a potent allegory.
