off-duty seraphim Darmo, Paris

In many traditions, certain figures exist only to accompany the dead, to escort souls from one world to the next and prepare them for what follows. aurèce vettier gathers them under a single name, the seraphim. off-duty seraphim opens on a simple, unsettling hypothesis: should the wealthiest among us one day defeat death, these figures would lose their reason for being. Left without souls to guide, the seraphim hover, disoriented, and slowly become something else. From that suspended condition the exhibition draws its subject, and through it a meditation on immortality, on the old desire to overcome death, and on what such a victory might cost.

The works begin far from matter. aurèce vettier trains artificial intelligence models on his own archive, childhood photographs, dreams and fragments of memory, and lets images surface that were already latent in that material. What interests him has less to do with their generation than with their survival. Each image is made to leave the screen and pass into the most demanding of the métiers d'art, where it must earn its place.

The exhibition brings together a cabinet-sculpture in bronze gilded with palladium leaf, a high-relief in palladium-gilded bronze, oil paintings, Aubusson tapestries woven in dialogue with the painter Vincent Gicquel, and a large ensemble of pietra dura, the Florentine art of hardstone marquetry. From one medium to the next, a single tension holds: the most contemporary of tools placed in the service of the most durable of materials. Where the algorithm proposes endlessly and forgets, stone and bronze demand a choice and keep it. The image that survives that passage is the one the artist judged worthy of lasting.

off-duty seraphim stands at the crossroads of artificial intelligence and fine craftsmanship, and reads that crossroads as a question about time. What deserves to endure, when everything can be produced. What remains of a figure once its purpose is gone. The seraphim, off-duty, become the emblem of that suspended moment, caught between an age that still needed them and one that may no longer.