LOG 1 : SAUVE-GARDES

Paul Cottet Dumoulin develops a practice of a resolutely science-frictional power: scraped among the scattered fragments of present time, it irritates our apprehension of a radically near future. Inspired by the urban environment and tinged with the filter of an imagination nourished by anticipatory literature, the artworks of this artist, who graduated from the European School of Fine Arts in Brittany in 2018, betray an ambivalent attitude towards the contemporary. In the first place, the blurred and long-lasting image of burning embers imposes itself and persists. […]

Marie Chênel, art critic for DDAB, December 2020.

A decor of thorns surrounds a cryptic world.

In the center, sculptures, counterfeits of what we would expect from an ancient sculpture, surface of incrustation of a chronicle that evokes a fantastic tale of a living object, traveling through time and space and carrying imagination towards a vanished civilization, probably non-existent. We discover a story of emancipation in a world where the barriers of the body and the non-living disintegrate. We see vibrant lights like vague memories, a black sandbank like a promised land.

Each artwork refers to something that has not yet happened. With themes such as futuristic archaeology, these very contemporary materials tarnish its anachronistic image. Between these falsely antique sculptures, these flickering neon lights form a composition with a lighter. (This technique comes from memories spent burning time, trying to write on fire on the ceilings of bus stops and/or college toilets.) In addition, the short film made by using 3D software from a photogrammetric scan of sculptures offers a testimony on the story of an astral journey put into image once again by an incongruous collage that brings porosity between two worlds with vanishing barriers.

An interconnected narrative then forms and creates a mythology that is parallel to us. A backup, that of an undefined space or time.