"Between the Car and the Forest": aurèce vettier’s Resonant Dream
"As the world enters into resonance" is a passage from dreams to reality, from technology to the organic, and from the car to the forest. Welcome to the latent space.
Presented by Darmo on the occasion of Paris Art Basel Week, the solo exhibition by the artist aurèce vettier unfolds like a red thread through the grand, white rooms of a stately building in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. A poetic and sensory invitation, the works gradually shift the viewer’s perception as they move through the space, each room deepening the sense of crossing between worlds.
Created in 2019 by French artist Paul Mouginot (born in 1990), aurèce vettier is an artistic project whose name was generated by artificial intelligence, with collaboration between the artist and AI at the heart of his practice. A unique combination of emerging technologies and craft techniques such as metal casting and tapestry, aurèce vettier explores our relationship with nature, art and technology, remaining in this in-between space, this constant hybridity. Data is perceived as raw material to be worked, composed and exhibited with poetry and intention.
At the center of this practice lies the materialization of the invisible, the fragile balance between the real and the imaginary. Narrative and dreamlike, the works act as portals to alternate realities.
The experience begins with a series of dreams experienced by the artist, translated by artificial intelligence, then materialised in paint on canvas. A bearded man in the forest is followed by a golden butterfly, a pink car speeds by, a black cat walks alongside a bearded man, a butterfly carries the universe on its wings. Moments of life, dreams, other lives. So many scenes that can be interpreted in a thousand ways by magicians, mediums, or enlightened spirits from different cultures, but always with these powerful symbols that recur, like a guide who gives us the keys.
Trees are also scattered throughout the course, canonised and placed as symbols to be venerated or witnesses to a time when fire transformed their appearance? With a little attention, one discovers a butterfly that has come to rest there, a symbol of renewal and metamorphosis, and others that have remained on the wall, frozen between two wing beats. These encounters convey a sense of adoration for transition. The heaviness and rigidity of the bronze, fixed in this natural wood base, are contrasted with the lightness of the dead leaves ready to fly away and the butterfly with printed wings. Between nature and technology, the encounters between materials are present and contribute to the narrative: bronze and wood, precious stones and digital prints on Korean fiber paper, and natural forms generated by an algorithm.
Dreams captured on canvas, trees and butterflies embodied and sanctified in precious materials, the last room invites us on a stroll through the forest. A forest of symbols opens up before us, revealing a world of mindfulness, guided by a sky with two moons. The centerpiece of the exhibition is undoubtedly the tapestry produced in collaboration with the Manufacture d'Aubusson for the exhibition ‘Echoes of the Past, Promises of the Future’ at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon in 2025: la traversée de la forêt (Crossing the Forest).
A nighttime scene of an otherworldly mountain landscape unfolds over nearly 4 meters in length. Are we once again witnessing the artist's dream? Or have the dreams of the machine intertwined to achieve this level of detail? A true interspecies collaboration between human and machine, algorithm and craftsmanship, and code and textile, this moment, forever woven into the fabric, is a celebration of the liminal zone. A car parked at the edge of the forest, a ghost behind a tree, a supernova in the sky, and clouds of light on the treetops.
Neither here nor elsewhere.
As the world enters into resonance by aurèce vettier at Darmo, 16 Boulevard des Invalides, 75007 Paris, until 26th October.
