Ten years after Mechanical Stress, his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Eva Vautier, Florian Pugnaire returns with a new exhibition built around Catenae,…
Ten years after Mechanical Stress, his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Eva Vautier, Florian Pugnaire returns with a new exhibition built around Catenae, his latest film, produced in 2025 with the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles (Paris) and Botanique (Brussels). In planetary geology, the term catena (catenae in the plural) designates a succession of craters resulting from a series of asteroid impacts, or an alignment of depressions on the ground surface following the collapse of underground galleries. This Latin term, from which the French word « chaînes » (chains) derives, is the starting point of an installation project resulting from a chain of catastrophes. Stained, torn or melted, fragments of a ruined set cover the walls, evoking a veritable landscape of desolation. These scraps of architecture serve as the support for residual sculptures, preserved like relics, which seem to bear witness to a particular experience: the self-destruction of an exhibition. A little further on, a fictional film reveals the successive stages of this process: in a set built from scratch, recalling a gallery or a museum, an immaculate whiteness floods a dozen works in a mock solo exhibition. Gradually becoming the stage for a chain of destructions, the space self-destructs progressively through chemical or mechanical devices built into the set. The film bears witness to the process of making, destroying and transforming objects and spaces, unfolding in a way that brings physicality and sculptural tension to their peak. The artworks here raise the question of their own autonomy, and push it to its paroxysm by embodying themselves in autophagous objects struggling with their environment. Filmed like bodies subject to destructive and creative drives, they come alive with a will of their own, in a story without dialogue in which they are the sole characters. The film thus breaks free from its documentary status, to plunge the viewer into a fictional experience, at the heart of matter. The Catenae project is concerned with the traces and artefacts resulting from an artistic process, as well as with the question of their preservation and of their resistance to the passage of time. The notion of exhibition is both the starting point and the end goal of the project, in a reflection on the making of ruins, where the act of creation and the act of destruction merge. A graduate of the Villa Arson (Nice) in 2006, Florian Pugnaire then continued his studies at Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing). The artist pays particular attention to the notion of the studio as a place of practice, but also as a place of fiction, an in-between where the purpose of the work is not yet defined and where everything can still be invented or modified. He shows an interest in the process of fabrication and creation, and places his work in an intermediate space between the studio and the place of exhibition. He works on the material, on time, and on the space contained within the act of creation. It was not…
