PARIS.- With the support of the Emerige Grant Funds, which awarded him its Revelation Grants in 2016, Michel Rein presents Edgar Sarin’s first solo show at the gallery.

The Mechanics of the Body
Edgar Sarin creates installations which associate language and music with both the simplest of found objects and the most precious of metals. He hews out stone, sculpts wood, composes scores, and stages gestures and situations. Each exhibition and every piece is the ramification of a one-off and complete approach examining the circumstances of the development of rough primitive models towards their fulfilment as civilized forms. This aesthetic and plastic research is organized by a raft of precise, elementary rules forming the work’s physical nature. This work is a body that is tamed by each one of its facettes. Edgar Sarin develops the physics of his oeuvre; he constructs its mechanics, and its inner movement, where each thing is linked to all the others, and they unchangingly involve one another, following a movement that has become natural and necessary, towards the end purpose for which they have been designed. Just as physics is an experimental science studying natural phenomena and their evolution, with the aim of shaping our environment, Edgar Sarin’s work is similarly organized around a sum of experiences aimed at understanding the nature of art.”

A fauna of visible objects has appeared late in the output of this artist, who previously worked essentially with elements removed from the spectator’s eye (Conces sions à perpétuité). Everything he had confined in those early works has instinctively been turned into a genetic heritage, and started to have an impact on the world of the visible. Since then, he has been preparing and endlessly updating a list of objects which he is waiting to encounter either by chance or by accident. The object thus assumes meaning and immediately demonstrates its necessity. Although Edgar Sarin pays attention to their harmony and their proportions, it is above all the nature and varying potential of these objects which matters.

Like a rudimentary array of his vocabulary, they are stored as an unrefined raw material waiting to be used, and even re-used. It is not a matter of reducing them to a single use or function. The artist thus anticipates the reversibility of each one of his gestures while at the same time lending his work a particularly physical and plastic nature. He does not assemble objects by means of solid fixtures; he uses their features so as to keep them in a state of equilibrium between tension and gravity, deploying just the right and necessary effort. This form of “ecology of the gesture”1 is a way of fighting against the entropic character of the work of art.

The discovery and accumulation of raw materials are part and parcel of a state of emergency, working towards the formation of an embryo of civilization. This state of emergency, creating a specific environment, permits a new state of consciousness: the system of thought disappears in favour of just the mechanics of the body, whose action is determined by the restrictions dictated by the environment. The work thus stems from the intuition which takes on a material form through a movement of spatial inhabitation.

“I am behind the idea that the work is an effect of life, that it appears through the force of things […]. Its production results from a mechanism rising towards a higher state of civilization, until it becomes an almost human object; an object containing a mistake, or a risk at the very least.” (Edgar Sarin)

It is the experience that is renewed in every exhibition. At this stage, the artist is merely mechanical. The objects, gradually filling space, are themselves refined by finding their place and their function. In combining with each other, they become the modules of one and the same body, and operate by being organized in a rational way.

The exhibition is a pretext for the process of creation, a system of constraints within which are developed the mechanisms for refining objects towards their state of civilization. As a (re)search process, the exhibition is also a time permitting the experience of the validity of objects which only previously existed in a primitive form. Their very nature as works is thus itself questioned: as a new entity, the work is not self-explanatory, it is an effect of life, it involves a risk, a mistake, simultaneously endangering spectator and creator. Edgar Sarin’s oeuvre demands a lot from the onlooker, who must go along with the artist in the understanding of the work; so we can observe the shift from a posture of contemplation towards a movement of creation. As problematic entities and systems of constraints, the works are always conceived by the artist as a point of departure. They are objects which must be tamed and they are at the same time bearers of a residual energy, and a history that is peculiar to them and which cannot be limited to the way in which they are seen by the artist.

Relying on hunches and accidents, Edgar Sarin’s gesture fashions an autonomous body that is painstakingly conceived and balanced, having its own inner mechanics within which all the elements gradually form an intimate harmony, to create a work.