Aurélien Froment

Aurélien Froment’s “documentary style” not only reveals existing forms, but it also determines other ways of dreaming them by seeking the right transformation, that enables the past to build a future. The artist aims at making an effort of imagination to connect himself to faraway things in order to put them on a common stage and determine their importance together. In this light, he has conceived the inventory of the elements constituting the Ideal Palace of postman Cheval, a work of architecture which is so intense that only a closer vision may contribute to shedding light on this “work of one man”, concerned about his own pace. What these figures (imaginary animals, plants, ornaments, etc) carved in rock and photographed separately depict, is a different life pulse, a rhythm that the world needs as a kind of support. Aurélien Froment mobilises and engages us through the awareness of singularities like the latter. These pieces translate performative thinking in relation to preexisting works: they seek to stress the path that starts with the gesture and leads towards the form, and vice versa. The exhibition will always be, for the artist, a way of not forgetting what might be called “the arising of the gesture” - the way in which the gesture enables us to truly make use of forms as much as it helps us become receptive.