White ceramic bowls float on this blue surface, generating melodious and enchanting sounds, driven by a light current. These acoustic vibrations, free from any intervention by a performer, constitute the very heart of the work, a true symphony of the moment that evolves with a flow of invisible waves. This work is part of a tradition in which sound becomes living matter, freed from the constraints of music as we usually understand it, and in which the visitor is invited to actively participate in the experience. The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random motion of atoms, a concept that resonates with the inevitably mutable and unpredictable nature of the work. Each moment of the life of the installation is unique, offering a continuously renewing sensorial and temporal experience.
Born in 1961 in Nice, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot lives and works in Sète
His works, exhibited over the past thirty years in contemporary art spaces in France and abroad, should be seen primarily as those of a musician. After being a composer for the Side One—Posthume Théâtre company of the author and director Pascal Rambert from 1985 to 1994, Boursier-Mougenot began to give an independent form to his music by creating installations. Starting from different situations and objects, from which he extracts the musical potential, he develops systems that extend the notion of a musical score to the most heterodox configurations of materials and media that he uses to generate, usually as live performances, sound forms that he describes as alive. Created in resonance with the architectural and environmental characteristics of the exhibition space, each system provides the ideal framework for a listening experience that, offered to the eyes and ears of the visitor, reveals the process that generates the music.
“The concentric vibrations on the surface of this blue expansion evoke the desire to capture infinity in the closed space of the canvas, an aspiration shared by Miró in his Blue Trilogy, by Mark Rothko in his ability to capture silence through his atmospheric glazes, and by Monet in the way he gave a sense of infinity to a fragment of pond dotted with white water lilies. But Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s work does not formalize a pre-existing pictorial intention. It is rather the culmination of a compositional process that alone generates the form. We are well aware of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s interest in materials that she reconfigures to liberate objects from their usual functions. Her approach is in line with the aesthetics of diversion inherited from Dada and Fluxus, which she has revitalized. She also draws inspiration from the do-it-yourself ethos that permeates the entire New York music scene, from punk to experimental music. From the 80s 'XNUMX onwards, he challenged the legacy of post-serial music, which he studied at school”.
—Emma Lavigne, exhibition curator, chief curator and general director of the Pinault Collection
