Indira Béraud
There are references to the medieval era that punctuate your every work through titles, symbols and other aesthetic references. Can you tell us more about your relationship with that period?
Floryan Varennes
This particular taste for history, and especially for the Middle Ages, developed little by little, but has been latent for a long time. I started reading Tolkien at the age of eleven and was overwhelmed by role-playing games and video games. I went through comprehensively idealized Middle Ages, absolutely wonderful, fantastic Middle Ages, and it never really left me. All this of course has crept into my works, particularly with references to neo-Gothic architecture, in which the Nineteenth Century pays tribute to feudalism.
I study past phenomena, what they have left us and the events that come with them. When I started my undergraduate art studies, for me there was only Louise Bourgeois, who was an ideal mother to me. The father figure was Tolkien. I loved – and still love – the Pre-Raphaelites, the symbolists and the troubadours. I am attracted to the du Limbourg brothers, Enguerrand Quarton as well as artists such as Jordan Wolfson and David Altmejd. It is figures like these that have led me to evoke, through my plastic research, a system of strong and surprising visual signs.
What stimulates my investigation now is the visceral need to reactivate a visual system of dated signs that is often lacking in the contemporary collective unconscious. I started from this premise to create transhistorical echoes. The piece “Puncutm Saliens” is the manifesto of this approach. In this installation the whole relationship with the heraldic aesthetic that I like, especially tournaments, is played out. This piece consists of numerous holographic leather banners. Taking the form of a concave web, it evokes symbols and emblems which may in turn recall the world of war and prison – both physical and psychic. By analogy with the military parades, the row of banners seems to vibrate and shine, like flags in a row.
Indira Béraud
Without ever representing it explicitly, you constantly tackle the theme of the body. How does it characterise your work?
Floryan Varennes
My first postulate is actually to talk about the body and its extensions without ever showing it. The relationship with absence is absolutely inherent to my practice. It is the guideline of my work. That is, treating a fragmented, skinned, submissive, dissected, extended, stretched, excavated, ostentatious but invisible body. I try to represent absence through a mechanism that touches the body. I find it powerful to speak of absence because it leads to stronger resentments. After all, absence is memory, it is the trace that a body left, and sparks the imagination. With absence there is also something that refers directly to lacking, and therefore to desire. There is a frustrating relationship, a psychological experience as so often in art: artists develop forms and the public cannot touch them. I like to highlight the fleshy aspect of my works to provoke desire when confronted with something unreachable. Everything is suspended in this wait, in this desire for a sacred, untouchable object.
Indira Béraud
You hijack the garment and more generally what it embodies. With Hierarchs and Dysphoria, for example, you transform typically male objects, such as the collar of a shirt and the lapels of a jacket, in order to challenge gender and power relationships. Can you tell us how you translate your reflection on gender identity, especially into clothing?
Floryan Varennes
I started with clothing because I was interested in the genre. In addition to being the trace of a body, the garment is also a costume. I dedicated my thesis to the role of clothing in contemporary art. I have examined over three hundred artists. Clothing is an ornament, but also a protection. It says something and at the same time it is connected to a sexualized prudishness: it shows or points to a sex. Clothing can express both gender and rank. It expresses the hierarchy and social norms that I wanted, slowly, to twist and turn. I am particularly interested in the shirt because it dates way back in time, up to the medieval era. It is an undergarment which has become a garment and the collar is both an aesthetic and a historical elaboration. For me, the shirt is the embodiment of man. Later this created an incredible ambivalence: for example, it became the symbol of white-collar workers. The Hierarchs, my first iconic works, are bas-reliefs arranged on the wall like trophies in the shape daggers and arrowhead. With a simple gesture (the beheading of the collar) I question this sartorial identity. I try to create confusion in this stratification between men’s and women’s role, the role of gender and non-gender. But in the past two to three years I have worked less and less with clothes. I look for new materials while maintaining the same statement. For example, this is obvious in one of my latest works, Youth: two orthopedic collars assembled together which outline a vulva seen horizontally. With rows of pearls rolling down, this installation refers to the image of an apse basin which in turn recalls the shape of a stoup and more.
Indira Béraud
The world of medicine is also represented in your work. You use various therapeutic devices such as the orthosis in Metamerism, the display of the pieces is purified, ordered, even sanitized, creating a simile between the artist and the surgeon. By what process did the medical language enter your work?
Floryan Varennes
I hadn’t thought about it, but I agree completely with this comparison. The therapeutic process is very important in my practice. The relationship with art as a sort of healing ritual also has to do with my personal history, since my mother works in the medical field. All this brings me back to Michel Foucault, to the notions of norm, care and all that has to do with power. In my work I put forward a parallel between the Middle Ages and hospitals. The medieval era is the idealization of something that cannot be experienced. Because I never get sick, I haven’t set foot in a hospital in a long time and I can imagine a lot of things about what’s going on in this type of a closed place. I approached things from this point of view, treating the hospital as a heterotopia. I am interested in all these body-related tools, which I recovered to use for my installations. The Archa Insula scarves are the first pieces I made from medical equipment. The structure contains used insulin needles that used to belong to a diabetic friend of mine. Autoimmune diseases are of particular interest to me because they affect the body, they are the result of a dysfunction of the immune system. So I used these little living memory capsules with which my friend injected herself. I put them together in a kind of small shield that I photographed and printed on scarves. For me it was a strong statement because with it I question the need to inject yourself for treatment. This is at the same time an act of protection, since insulin acts as a shield, and of ritualized self-mutilation. We are somewhere in between (which I love very much) violence and gentleness, the relationship with care and an act of war. For my friend it has become a standard thing which cannot be avoided because her health depends on it. I transformed this medical relationship into scarves that I hung on the wall as if they were bas-reliefs. They can also be worn around the neck. The idea of needles arranged around the neck is also present in Dysphoria: white collars lined with pins.
Finally, on the other hand, I act like a surgeon with shirts and collars: I take them, cut them, sew them, sew them up and this creates a schedule. I do the same thing with orthoses: I take them, cut them, cut them out, sew them and turn them into huge medieval breast plates. In Metamerism I also rewrite the issues of affiliation and identity, because it represents a heraldry. Affiliation is both a strength and a weakness: it has to do with ancestry, family and the past.
Indira Béraud
You present works made up of bits of armor, you create circumscribed spaces in which the spectator is invited to enter, and fences that evoke a prison. Thus the vocabulary of confinement develops in your work, placing protection and isolation on the same level. What do you think of the constraints of the body in your work?
Floryan Varennes
I am interested in BDSM and fetishism as a social subject. They are made up of relationships of domination, of submission that leads to pleasure, as well as of care in a certain way; all this is layered in my work. In addition to bodily practices, there is a very powerful aesthetic which emerged over time and continues to this day. I am just a continuator, it is something that has been approached by many artists, like Monica Bonvicini. This aesthetic of violence is very present in my work but, once again, it is ambivalent. Hierarchs form daggers, but also an extremely soft jacket. Fin’Amor’s glass jousting spear could be incredibly violent, but it is made of glass and therefore very fragile. The leather wall, called Delectatio Morosa, in reference to courtly love, is actually soft, pleasant and permeable. This aesthetic is therefore always counterbalanced by paradoxes, and vice versa. Hierophany, made up of several embroidered and layered collars, which may seem to have an aesthetic value, creates a hypersexualized vulvar monster. My work is based on opposites. The tension is permanent in suspension as well as in amoral tension. The aesthetic of violence may be visible or not, but it is always present because it is linked to excessive masculinity, which I challenge. I try to interweave hypermascolonity and hyperfemininity, sensuality and virility. In my opinion, sensuality belongs to both the female and the male. My jousting spear is a piece that mixes all these aspects. It is the allegory of a courtesan culture. I am madly fond of courtly torture and its opposite, courtly love, both typical of the Middle Ages. The fragility of the material reflects the feeling of love: strong and vulnerable at the same time. Romantic and sexual relationships are topics that I call into question a lot. Combat is cavalry par excellence, but it is also delicacy, skill, it is somewhat sporty. At the same time this piece is sublimated because we are in this androgynous relationship. I modeled this glass spear and added an arrowhead-shaped loop. The relationship is contradictory: the love affair is instantly fixed in time.
Indira Béraud
The seduction game is a recurring theme in your work. Fin’Amor, for example, illustrates the fragility of love, the struggle and uncertainty of conquest. This work appears to be the eulogy to a sublimated relationship. Florian Gaité sees in it a critique of contemporary relationships, often seen as an object of consumption, victims of an era in which immediate satisfaction is preferred. As he himself points out, sublimation in the psychoanalytic jargon consists of resisting one’s own impulses to reconcile desire with social conventions. Can you tell us about your relationship with psychoanalysis?
Floryan Varennes
I am very interested in Carl Gustav Jung. He is one of the psychiatrists who greatly influence my work because I study symbols, the soul, the animus, collective memory and synchronicity. Synchronicity is when elements that have no causal link between them are associated, thus acquiring meaning. It is the idea that nothing is left to chance. Jung’s psychoanalytic readings enriched my understanding of symbols, of what can always be said otherwise. My work is pervaded by this: how to talk about something without mentioning it, especially with the body. I also explore sexuality a lot, indirectly. Georges Duby, a medieval historian, studies homosexuality within the context of cavalry. I like this a lot. I wonder if it was possible. I like to project myself into these fantasies and imagine what the truth might be. The cavalry combat also depends on this: it is very idealized. My research, combined with psychoanalysis, allows me to approach gender studies and history simultaneously.