Introduction
Esther Schipper is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition in our Paris gallery, Etienne Chambaud’s Expansion. Especially conceived for the space, Expansion is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, after presenting Inexistence at Esther Schipper in Berlin in 2021. On view will be a sound installation and sculptures.
For Chambaud, an exhibition exists as a condition of contradictory states, as a site where things and beings could alternatively or simultaneously emerge, change or remain absent. The works in the exhibition share a certain tension between what can be experienced, seen, and known.
Entering the gallery, visitors will find the first two rooms at first nearly empty. A sound installation entitled Syrinx brings into the exhibition space the sound of multiple birds. Their intricate vocalizations, synthetized by artificial neural networks, are in a constant process of contamination and metamorphosis, as each bird’s distinct voice is differently affected by another. The time of the exhibition, then, is a time of invention of new individuals, new species, new languages.
Only a dead fox—or better, A Dead Dead Fox—also inhabits this space, placed on the floor among the technical equipment of Syrinx. In a contradictory gesture, the fox has been prepared by a taxidermist to appear dead, drawing attention to the conventional repression and denial of death in taxidermy, where the dead animals are often posed in a particularly “life-like” pose.
In the adjacent room, a new series of works entitled Stases combine found elements and 3D-printed materials. A further development of the artist’s modified panel paintings, Uncreatures, presented as part of Inexistence in Berlin in 2021, the new series has a pronounced sculptural quality.
Taking as point of departure, the found objects used to decorate and also to protect religious icons, known as an oklad or riza, Chambaud’s works suggest the uncovered surface has projected out through the openings in an amorphous shape, determined by digital simulations of specific organic or mineral growth patterns. Each of the works in the series is the result of an excessive computational and material development out of the void where an icon used to be.
In dialogue with the Stases works, a bronze sculpture from the artist’s series Necknot is placed on the floor. Both organic and mathematical, it consists of an assemblage of severed bird’s necks joined together in a continuous knot. Punctuating the space, glass sculptures from the series Globes are positioned to catch the light. The works contain and conserve the remains of objects and materials that were destroyed and transformed by the very process of their inclusion in the molten glass.