Le Laboratoire de l’Univers

(The Laboratory of the Universe)

2020

The Laboratory of the Universe questions our historical perception of the sky beyond the celestial vault, towards the Cosmos; that infinity imperceptible to the naked eye which, in the history of Man, has fuelled many fantasies. Like an huge black screen, the sky is an astonishing projection surface that welcomes our most futuristic aspirations and pushes us to ponder on our relationship with the Earth and the Universe. Always present above his head, the planets and stars have stimulated man's imagination, arousing in him the desire to reach them. Before the invention of the rocket, wasn't the imagination - a fantastic and inexhaustible field stimulated by the observation of the unknown - the source of scientist proposals? Has the call to dream suggested by a starry sky been futile since Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon? And if we go back in time, what were the concrete means of observing the Universe? The fictions proposed throughout the series are to be considered as a mental model, a fundamental stimulus for the apprehension by men of his environment. Transforming myself into an "astronomical artist", I reproduce a descriptive art of the cosmos, setting itself up as a mimesis of the invisible and sharing a form of evolution of the visions of these distant worlds. Imagination becomes the raw material for the creation of an image conceived from abstract scientific data. Collages, archives, photographs, fragments of bottled asteroids, sculptures, ready-made assemblages and poetic writings, these productions are as much scientific research as they are artifice. Between scientific research laboratory, curiosity cabinet and objects that bear witness to a cosmic elsewhere, the project The Laboratory of the Universe thus seeks to make us lose our footing, inviting us to enter a poetic and fictional world punctuated by metaphysical questioning.
Travelling thanks to the "wings of astronomy" (Abbé Moreux), the project, better than a spaceship, transports us indiscriminately to Saturn, an asteroid or a comet, and even to a planet whose existence we are still unaware of, and tends to remind us how much we need to imagine other lands at a time when we are in the process of "losing" ours. And our fantasy machine reminds us of these infinite spaces to divert us from this earthly explosion.