"...rather than wallow in critique or denounce and deprecate the city, Ola is able to find the aesthetic weak spots and exploit them."
Images copyright © Denis Trauchessec 2021
Denis Trauchessec’s work describes an existential tension between people and the environments they inhabit.
Delicate matrices of copper suspended in a blue soup of Silver Nitrate form “De Urbe mutanti”, 2012, an installation/sculptural work that excites its viewers with its unending metamorphosis from one form to another.
Through chemical alchemy, delicate, fragile and gently glistening crystals grow from the fiery shiny surfaces of a grid made from beautiful copper. The grid itself, turns out to be a city street plan. Recognition of this grid necessitates an uneasy and basal response leaning towards the sublime, an overwhelmingly odious feeling of being insignificant in the face of something much greater and larger than oneself.
The grid of the city is representative of a system, a system that each individual plays a part within, be it the flaneur or the worker-ant like role of office inhabitants. Whether by choice or by impulsion, these individuals form the body of the city and flow along the lines and squares that make up the metropolis of roads and buildings.
The city is alive and growing, as are the tiny crystals on the Copper, and, as in the city, reach a saturation point where they fall from the safe harbour that the city has become. This eternal creation and destruction of form is housed within a glass bowl that magnifies the contents whilst protecting it from the outside world.
This, placed in a gallery, which in itself is in a city forms a fractal relationship between what the work describes, ourselves as viewers and the cities and towns we inhabit. The light blue fluid contained within parodies the perceived limitlessness of the sky which, with its glass transparent barrier, is patently finite.
Trauchessec’s work allows us to pause, take stock and contemplate one’s position within existence and come to the conclusion that we all form an integral part in the machinery of the city, the town and indeed everywhere.
The physical fragility of the work shows that no matter how small, ones individual actions, just like a tiny vibration in the fluid of the bowl dislodging crystals, can have greater impact on the world at large.