Pharmakon

In the first room, an installation of LED screens shows videos of medicinal flowers and plants filmed very close-up, plunging the viewer into a stream of forms, colours and lights. The extreme digital precision—oscillating between clarity, plays with soft focus, and alterations in the film’s source code—produces an image verging on abstraction. In the same room, a soundtrack plays a composition altered through the digital transcription of the smell of myrrh. The incense spreads its curative properties in the form of sound, infiltrating the structure with the initial recording and soaking the visitor in an atmosphere that is both lyrical and concrete, and vaguely religious.

Facing this installation, Antoine Renard has created a series of aluminium wall sculptures derived from a 3D scan of a young child. Cut up and manually reassembled, these representations of the digital child are a cross between the Christ angel, the voodoo doll and the modern clone. They do not dispose of any misfires from the production process, any of the scanning or printing imperfections, generating the feeling of a digital hologram petrified in and by metal. These sculptures are part of the artist’s broader reflection on the importance of screens and images and their involvement in our individual construction. Each sculpture looks like an ex-voto or talisman whose body is fragmented, and at the same time it gives off a scent, or rather a smoke, which the artist specially designed for the exhibition in the form of a burning-paste made from various plants and resins. Here the works are presented as screens whose medium is not light but smoke, and like the video installation, they act through permeation and are capable of sparking memories, a private and distant link with each person’s past and/or present In the second room of the exhibition,

Antoine Renard presents a series of structures made of wooden boards and melted wax, loosely inspired by geometric principles linked to the body, those which regulate the sacred architecture of temples and other places of worship. Scented, unstable and fragile, these micro-architectures that resemble modernist church candles stand like psychological constructs, midway
between construction and deconstruction, a kind of solidified, glazed, dripping ruins fluctuating according to the ambient temperature. They reflect the artist’s interest in the link between scent, architecture and memory.

Speaking of his research at the Villa Médicis, he said: “I’ve understood that at the psychological level, a scent is at once a place, a moment and a history imprinted on our consciousness. Like the gardens of the Villa Médicis, which are themselves a manifestation of the villa’s memory, I understood that scent does not represent a present or past moment. It is the very architecture of that moment experienced from the inside.”

The exhibition’s title Pharmakon borrows from the Greek term that means both “remedy” and “poison”. Contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler has also explored this notion, linking it with digital technologies, which act upon our lives like powers that are both destructive and liberating.