Encountering the aura of ruins. Evoking a cosmogony. The pieces shown by Charles Le Hyaric at the Claudine Papillon Gallery show an elusive world. There is nothing to know about it. On the contrary, what it displays is its own, subtle disappearance. Le Hyaric uses matter as a foundation for metaphysical dispositifs. Leaving its trace on the artist’s material, time is made perceptible, restored to the grace of the senses by the fertile articulation of various media. Le Hyaric blends various processes and techniques in order to devise richer, more complex experiments.

Though matter defines the locus, the weapons are picked by Le Hyaric. Matter is his muse: the constant miracle of its fascinating shapes is frozen into theatrical curves, resulting from the accidents provoked by the artist. Shapes never settle into a given state. On the contrary, they display the impossibility of sameness, of a mimesis that would betray the painstaking effort of technique. In the dispositifs devised by Le Hyaric, time is at work on place; it is a mythology of “inter-worlds”. 

Jagged volutes, resonant exhalations, evocative furrows, fragrant spaces: these are the many dimensions that haunt his sculpture. Since there is nothing to see, strictly speaking, this is a story of senses navigating beneath the surface. The way these objects are brought into the world endows them with an aura, a sense of ritual. It is the time of their formation that is displayed, that becomes a landscape offered to sensory exploration. These works suggest, evoke, the existence of a formal, self-generating mechanism of nature, coagulated and made tractable to the apperception of a gaze whose innocence has been restored.

The pieces presented at the Claudine Papillon Gallery, for instance the Focus series, offer a sampling of this mineral herbarium. Fragments of land, leading our intuition to weave the story of another world. Rotting tangles of pigment, dams of honey, the vagaries of mould, the crumbling of gold leaf, erosion. 

In Wimp, it is the window that makes the landscape. Funérailles d’Eden bears witness to the transformation of a mysterious object: Le Hyaric left a sculpture, Eden, to ferment in a jar, before removing it and placing it in a garden where it ripened, exposed to the elements. A series of photographs records the work of time, the different states reformulating the threshold of experience. By crossing these ever-shifting thresholds, we can penetrate the various dimensions of a material language revealed by the activity of the artist. The choice of materials is, in itself, a language. The bleach and oil paint used in Naclo produce surprising apparitions conjuring lava flows, porous bones, craggy rocks or a landscape seen from the sky, crisscrossed by rivers with countless branches. The piece is a place, which has turned into a creature sustaining the states of its own materiality. The works presented at the Claudine Papillon Gallery bear witness to these states.

Margot Taupin, February 2015

Charles LE HYARIC – born in 1987, lives and works in Paris. Charles Le Hyaric graduated from École supérieure d’Art Graphique Penninghen in 2010 and continues his studies since 2013 at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Charles Le Hyaric recently showed several monumental installations and sculptures: Peulven at Parc Culturel de Rentilly, Mythique and Carbonnifère at Ecole des Beaux-Arts Paris. In 2015 he will have a solo show at galerie du Crous, Paris. 

Leurre du temps is his first solo exhibition at Claudine Papillon Gallery.