Baptiste Debombourg

Angel Moya Garcia

AMG: Your environmental installations are often made with crushed glass that colonizes a given space. A material and a type of work that could make think on an aggression, violence, and hardness, almost like your irascible act toward everything around you. Instead, in front of your work you breathe a certain calm, a suspension that evokes a non-tension atmosphere, but of absolute serenity, fluidity and balance calculated to the very latest detail.
How can we read this duplicity ?

BD:
Sometimes the meeting of two different elements make a strong impact. I like this impact in reality, this is what provokes changes in life. When I work on an environmental installation, the immersive aspect of the installation is crucial, it is what gives truth to the work, that’s why for me the details make the difference. When I am in the process of creating an installation, the entire process is very demanding, the long process of conceiving it, and then especially the final stage, the construction of the installation which is physically and emotionally exhausting. But the final result is what counts, it is an achievement of the imagination, when the dream becomes true, when it becomes real. Then, the artwork starts to exist apart from me, in front of everybody, and that is exactly what should be the goal for any artwork - that's my point of view.

AMG: On this occasion, the starting point was the invitation to reflect on the entropy processes that overlook our everyday life and on possible attempts to establish an order by elaborating a taxonomy of the components of reality to suggest a possibility stable or ultimately, to consciously overlook this intent. What were the reflections that led you to present these new installation (R)EVOLVE and how does it fit into your production ?

BD:
What I like in entropy is the notion of unpredictability. I like this approach because it is open to a different perception of the world, the distortion, until the point when things start being abstract to us. Strangely, I don’t trust disorder. I believe that it is just an order that is too complex for our perception. For the Tensioni struturalli I was interested by cosmology, and my starting point evolved around the historical context of the Italien renaissance, and the influence of form and the notion of the elipse in art, architecture - this form was a revolution at the time.
In my work I like to use raw materials because they connect to our material reality. Materials that are a trace of our human activities. The reason why I used specifically laminated glass, is precisely because I find that this material is a witness of our time. The source of its existence started because of a terrorist act and car accidents, the bursting glass causing destruction and injury. Laminated glass preserves the impact, this aspect of the material interest me because there is temporality behind it.
I was working on the installation in connection with these two ideas, the idea of movement and acceleration in relation to the architectural context of the Galerie in Florence which is an old Renaissance palazzo.
For this glass installation, which is my 10th, I wanted to suggest a centrifugal movement, which is 'open' for the viewer to enter in it. In the physical confrontation with the glass, which is at the same time beautiful and dangerous, the viewer explores through his senses the notions of speed, accidents, energy and cosmology.

AMG: The formal restitution refers to the symbolism, the movement and the tension of the elliptical shape. In particular, it refers to the rupture that represented the ellipse as a new form inspired and linked to heliocentrism, as opposed to the circular representation bound to the geocentric system. How can we still consider today the lack of certainty and the complexity of modern man ?

BD:
Independently of our fear, the rupture is always a new start, I think we are currently living at the end of an era, a system that started about a century ago. My work explores the idea of mutation, transformation, even explosion and the effect of shock. Our great challenge is to be able to accept it, to use it as an energy, and envision a new perspective for the future.
Interview realised in the frame of the groupshow Tensioni Strutturali # 3 exhibited at the Eduardo Secci Gallery in Florence in Italie
Angel Moya Garcia is a independent art curator and critic, he is the art director of the private Art Foundation Dello Scompiglio in Italie. He regularly collaborates with contemporary art galleries, institutions and magazines such as Arttribune.