POST-PROPHYLAXIS
A focus on Floryan Varennes practice.
With contributions by Indira Béraud, Benoît Lamy and Florian Gaité.
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.
AND THE HERALDS OF HISTORY WERE SUBMITTED TO THE QUESTION…
Against the current of contemporary materialism, Floryan Varennes works with the body, its representations and extensions, without showing it, sensitive to what constitutes it without incarnating it. The body as a phenomenon appears in his work as a symbolic conglomerate (psychological, political, metaphysical) whose complexity makes it extraordinarily plastic. To better unleash his metamorphic potential, he shapes sculptures, installations and hybrid objects that subvert reference systems, whether it is clothing conventions, colour codes, gender identities, social authorities or medical standards. His act of deconstruction thus consists in twisting history, thwarting the processes of identification and reinterpreting the archetypes to question this body-surface here dug, dissected, deployed from its voids which paradoxically reinforce its presence. Minimalist in their compositions, clinical in their presentations, his works base their formal refinement on a solid conceptual foundation. Floryan Varennes condenses in each of them the results of his extensive research, which borrows as much from medieval history, psychoanalysis, philosophy or sociology of fashion, as from medicine and gender studies. Their scholarly titles, sometimes sibylline, betray an erudition delivered here without authority and which resonates in each of the signs lodged in the hollow of these absent bodies.
The body in default is also that of the artist in production who is constrained to a rigorous, almost monastic discipline. Patiently, scrupulously, he threads pearls, embroiders them, pins thousands of needles and assembles squares of fabric, experiencing a ritual rehearsal, related to both surgical care and religious asceticism. The worlds of the medical and the sacred are two universes of reference that Floryan Varennes constantly hybridizes. Their tension reflects back to back two visions of the body that share its symbolic potential: on the one hand, that of science that reifies the body by rationalizing it, and on the other hand, that of religion that disciplines it by sanctifying it.
Its medievalist positioning1 corresponds to the need to reactivate the imagination of an idealized body that is missing from the contemporary collective unconscious. Rather than seeing it as a counter-model to modernity, Floryan Varennes reevaluates the thinking of the Middle Ages and, through it, the debt that our times have incurred towards it. The study of manuscripts, tapestries, sculptures, bas-reliefs and paintings of the Middle Ages thus very quickly led him to reconsider the idea of a unanimous condemnation of carnal life to discover a time when medicine was in dialogue with alchemy, when homosexuality was not always rejected and androgyny was elevated to the rank of ideal. The reading of medieval Christian philosophers (Saint-Augustin, Hildegarde de Bingen, Thomas d’Aquin) and contemporary historians (Jacques Le Goff, Régine Pernoud, Michel Pastoureau, Colette Beaune ou Didier Lett) thus inspired him to adopt a dual vision, rather than a dualistic one, reconciling the ascetic ideal and the idea of concupiscence. This way of standing in between, characterizes his thinking well, that of making the dichotomies active, of building significant bridges between the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, love and war, pleasure and pain.
If medieval culture has conveyed many archetypes, it has also shaped its own symbols. A fervent reader of the many theses that Michel Pastoureau has devoted to medieval heraldry, Floryan Varennes completes his investigation of the symbolic field by bringing cultural codes down to the level of the plastic sign. Geometric patterns are therefore never used only for their compositional qualities, but also for their power of meaning. This is the case with the diamond (cut out of scarves, embroidered on trousers, dug into banners, drawn by contours on jacket collars) which symbolizes a hyphen, whether it is a door between the earth and the heavens, or the vulva which allows the passage between the interiority uterine and the outside world. Similarly, the grid is not only a means of prolonging the call to emptiness of abstract painters, it also refers, as Rosalind Krauss2 proposes, to an infinite, divine, sacred space, which lends itself to spiritualist projections.
With the notion of adornment, Floryan Varennes finds a conceptual field where the languages of three places of representation converge: the social, the martial and the medical. Sharing their etymology, the “adornment”, an expression of social role-playing, here refers to the military “parade”, a means of displaying power attributes3, as well as to the therapeutic “apparatus”, or all the medical devices that assist and extend the body. By synthesizing the means of adorning the body, Floryan Varennes revises their imaginations and questions them in a new light. The blurring between these three semantic categories, which are a priori not very conducive to comparison (society, war, medicine), allows Floryan Varennes to make extremely significant connections, raising very concrete questions, particularly about the idea of care as a wartime act, combat and means of torture. The ornaments made by Floryan Varennes therefore redesign their usual value systems by inverting, in particular by sacralizing what is normally the responsibility of the profane. The hieratic aesthetic he develops is reflected in the solemnity of their placement in space and the choice of a black and white chromatic code. Presented on immaculate bases, hung on the wall or suspended, his works are also sacredized by the work of light that surrounds them and accentuates their brilliance, even to the point of likening them to relics or ex-votos. However, the artist’s tour de force consists in counteracting this call to transcendence by introducing trivial elements that disturb its immediate reading. At the heart of Floryan Varennes’ works are the two bodies of the king described by Ernst Kantorowicz4: divided between a sacred dimension and another profane one, they plunge the spectator into a state of permanent hesitation that thwarts his interpretative reflexes.
The body that Floryan Varennes seeks to capture and return is indeed an entity as concrete, which lives and experiences life, as spiritual, which finds in courteous ethics the means to codify itself. Indexed to the codes and customs of the court, the paradigm of courteous love, or rather the fine amor5, describes the way knights educated themselves to sensual pleasures by controlling their impulses, which were potentially homosexual6. Georges Duby thus showed how much the rites of seduction, supported by courtesan practices, were governed by a set of rules aimed at domesticating the excesses of desire. Waiting, chastity, the taste for trials and measures thus implemented a worldly game in such a way as to elevate the body to a certain degree of abstraction, which brings it closer to the aseptic body in medical representations. Floryan Varennes supports this comparison, seeing in the clinical distance of the body a way to idealize it. He also applies this courteous discipline to his creative process. Through mannerism and repetition of the gesture, he replays the difficult journey of the courtly knight and translates the sophistication of his love strategy into the formal refinement of the pieces.
Desire in courteous love does not refer exclusively to pleasure. Frustration, distance, silence and the obstacles to overcome that it engages are the causes of evils that torment the lover, and that must be experienced as such. Gathered under the expression of the Delectatio Morosa (delectatio: pleasure, amusement, and morality: delay, suspend), these sufferings represent the frustrations that desire encounters in the experience of waiting, absence and uncertainty of the success of the love project. This moral problem, which flourished in the theology of the 12th century, is in line with another strong idea, celle de la « torture courtoise », dont la pratique vise non pas tellement la douleur physique mais bien plutôt un mal psychologique, qui ne porte pas atteinte à l’intégrité du corps. Le thème des douleurs de l’esprit est ici le point de départ d’une réflexion plus générale sur l’ambivalence des affects, et le refus d’un partage binaire entre plaisir et peine. Cette pensée se concrétise dans la production d’objets duplices, qui mêlent le vocabulaire de la guerre et du champ médical pour mieux réévaluer la distinction entre blessure et soin. La sublimation des tortures, blessures de guerre, tourments amoureux et souffrances pathologiques permet alors d’en prendre la mesure sans se laisser affliger. L’opération sublimatoire s’incarne ici dans le façonnement d’une esthétique duelle qui transforme le dégoût et l’aversion en jouissance esthétique. L’utilisation d’aiguilles, du cuir ou d’instruments chirurgicaux associe ainsi leur aspect rutilant et séducteur à l’agressivité de leurs usages. Face à ces œuvres, le public est comme tenu en étau entre les souffrances auxquelles elles se réfèrent et la fascination qu’elles suscitent malgré tout.
The vast undertaking of heraldic reform carried out by Floryan Varennes ultimately led to the development of a singular system of signs, acting as an infinite hermeneutic supply. It is then up to the spectator to follow the symbolic path that the artist traces within these uchronic worlds, without hierarchy or order, where the contemporary becomes medieval, where the sacred becomes profane, where the feminine and the masculine become indistinguishable. The body, which literally shines by its absence, finds here in these settings the plastic minimum by which it can reveal itself. At the articulation between transhistoricity, transidentity and transfixion, his work operates with sagacious formal and conceptual transitions to better adorn the imaginary of the body with the attributes of the spirit. Subjected to medieval interrogation, twisting the certainties of ehistorical discourse, these heralds of a new genre end up constituting the terms of a committed and resolute manifesto, building a new idealism.
GAPING WOUND, NO SUTURE
Floryan Varennes merges war wounds and medical sutures into a set of pieces based on an absent hero, a knight straight out of a role-playing game whose attributes he only shows again: weapons, armour, accessories, emblems, banners and coats of arms. Translated into minimalist, extremely sophisticated forms, they constitute a body of work as mysterious as it is elegant, whose chromatic range contrasts clinical white, midnight blue, iridescent reflections, the brilliance of metal and the deep black of leather. With Ultra-Lésions, the visual artist continues his medievalist research by which he updates martial and medical knowledge by bringing it back to the sacred, to gender or to ceremonial. After having explored the notions of chivalry, courteous love and torture, he focuses here more particularly on the question of care by exhibiting means of defence, protective signs or symbolic remedies. His repertoire of gestures (cutting, assembling, threading, piercing, stretching…) is borrowed from the methods of a surgeon, as if to better transform thinking into dressing. The exhibition also marks a broadening of his conceptual network. The terms “parade”, “ornament” or “apparatus” around which his thinking revolves open up here to that of “appearance”: more than ever, it is a question of stretching the wound to the gaping hole and opening a temporal breach in its hollow.
The exhibition opens with the installation Mythopoëia, which is the genesis of a founding narrative, taking its name from a 1933 poem by Tolkien. Like so many sacred relics, it exposes the elements that preside over the fabrication of a myth, a founding narrative that borrows its elements from magical thought and appeals to the most archaic curiosity, a spontaneous attraction mixed with the desire to take care. Presented in a plexiglass box, organised like a surgical table, the set brings together mysterious fragments of black shirts set with pins, possible fragments of dismantled armour, archaeological remains of an immemorial history. Nine in number, symbol of perfection and ideal, these precious shapes invite sustained attention, imbued with a certain solemnity. As a mythographer, the artist seeks to arouse the viewer’s consideration for this cosmogonic narrative by returning the aesthetic fascination to the scruple of historical investigation or the meticulousness of clinical observation.
This same dual reading is found in Braca or The Kiss, a piece between the muzzle and the penis shell, which depicts the ambivalence of care and oppression. Made from models of medieval flies, which appeared in the 12th and 13th centuries, these hulls of virility seem here to be thwarted in their function of ostentation to become a device of constraint. Indeed, noticing that they are often represented in history portraits near the head of a dog, Floryan Varennes reinterprets the ornament as a muzzle that flirts with the fetishist accessory. What is supposed to exhibit, if not sublimate, virility can here be seen as what comes to contain it, organizing a constant swing between the idea of defence and that of coercion. Stretched between twisted steel wires, the two face-to-face muzzles stage a game between the shown and the hidden, like bodies trying to protect themselves. Adorned with a medical vinyl mask, lined and overturned, the muzzles can finally refer to a spat or a languid kiss, a declaration of war or a demonstration of love.
The last room of the exhibition is undoubtedly the one where the dramaturgical effort is pushed the furthest. Indeed, Floryan Varennes imagines a journey whose scenography allows us to detect a narrative progression, albeit non-linear. For the first time, he is arranging his banners, Punctum Saliens, across the space in such a way as to create an artificial forest in which to wander. With the series of standards, Floryan Varennes assumes more than ever the stakes of his heraldic aesthetics. The superimposition of the symbolic strata in their titles thus intertwines references to war and courtly love. Thus, here as often, the primary form of the war badge serves only as a pretext. Hollowed out, hollowed out, the standards lose their function of pomp and display in favour of a more subtle, but no less significant presence. Adopting the figure of the checkerboard, which combines the symbolism of the lozenge (vulva or earth/sky passage) and the grid (architecture of the sacred void), guidelines in the aesthetics of Floryan Varennes, they also evoke net traps, in which the eyes can get caught and get lost. The iridescence of the plasticized leather, for its part, helps to neutralize gender identities by alternating pink and bluish reflections, while its shimmering indicates a possibility of transcendence, whether one thinks of the inner light as a sign of God in Master Eckhart’s work or of the light posed by Plotinus as a sensitive manifestation of the Absolute, symptom of the Good, the True, the Beautiful.
Like several of the pieces presented, this device hides and uncovers at the same time.
The exhibition closes with In extremis, a bouquet of dried lavender strangled by a stainless steel chain that ensures its wall hanging. The tension between this fragile, crumbly floral composition and the coercive force of its hanging device is a way of replaying the contradiction between a curative purpose and the hardness of the means used to achieve it. The southern plant, whose therapeutic, soothing and healing virtues have been highlighted by Hildegarde de Bingen, in particular, calls for a first reading of the pharmacological imagination of the herbalist, the apothecary or the witch, and even of domestic care, used to perfume household linen. The plant sets up a subtle, diffuse olfactory atmosphere that could pass for a single mark of delicacy if its embalming did not coincide with its wilting, if its fragrance did not exhale a smell of death in the background. Between the art of the bouquet and the key to strangulation, Floryan Varennes here performs a simple gesture of assembly without technique (no embroidery, beading or riveting) that combines cosmetics and torture, the coldness of metal and the organicity of plants. A play of reflections finally animates the whole, marked by this purple colour associated with royalty and witchcraft, today considered as a degenerate colour, both masculine and feminine, claimed by the queer and feminist communities.
With Ultra-Lésions, Floryan Varennes assumes that the idea that healing can become a warrior act. Between the duel and the alchemical conversion, she operates aesthetic and semantic shifts that allow for a change of point of view: the primary seduction exercised by the pieces constantly negotiates with their displayed hostility, so that medicine here manifests its disciplinary, authoritarian and aggressive side. The work, which can be read through the prism of this complicit tension, bears the mark itself: it gives itself like a caress that at any moment can become a strike.
Florian Gaité
POST-PROPHYLAXIS
As a body of work, Floryan Varennes’s sculptures and installations, with their remarkable formal perfection, present a strange sparring between fascination and repulsion, between the absence of bodies and an imposing physical presence due the preciosity of their materials, their modes of presentation and the symbols they summon. Often involving combat weapons, surgical instruments or coercive repression equipment, his works fully engage in a subjective representation of violence. Not in order to explicitly condemn it, but more to consider its integration into the body as a life discipline, a way of learning to live with it so as to either better defend oneself against it, or build something out of the suffering it causes physically or psychologically. Armor and shields appear alongside scalpels and muzzles, but there is also lavender, a neck brace, fabrics and other soft materials, as if to appease and thwart the torture evoked by the cold, metallic torments of many of his creations. These therefore represent a kind of self-healing that could, when all is said and done, become the existential condition of the contemporary living being, subject to the most perfidious brutalities, those that make no noise, that do not say their name, being no one’s doing: a floating, lasting impression with no notable origin.
The transparency at work in Floryan Varennes’s creations could thus signify the disincarnate, diaphanous violence paradoxically suffered by all of today’s bodies in the post-democratic regime. If war is no longer the frontal one of the Middle Ages – from which the artist draws a significant number of his theoretical, historical and symbolic references -, it is indeed present through the everyday use of our modern media devices, our technological communication tools, through dehumanised work, and through divided human / animal / vegetable relations. But then how can a form, a presence be given to that violence ? Maybe by approaching it through its opposite, namely the notion of care, particularly when his works are made out of therapeutic accessories known to help life to triumph, for better or for worse.
Care is precisely what the artist has been focusing on lately, especially following his recent residency in a hospital environment, hence the vulnerability of bodies and things, as shown by his recurrent use of glass, lavender, textiles… But if he makes use of the notion of care, which is much perverted nowadays, it is not a matter of negating or suppressing the pain, without which there would be no need to take care. In his methods of representation, Floryan Varennes prefers to highlight the fact that violence and “taking care” remain the two sides of one same reality. His research is generally situated between two concepts, letting this in-between play out within his works. Between revisited medievalism and retrofuturist style, disinhibited sexuality and sacredness, with Floryan Varennes we watch a Queer Fantasy that evokes a suspended temporality in which the place of violence and love, and the way these two terms meet inside the body and on its surface, remain to be negotiated.
During his residency at Lindre-Basse, Floryan Varennes has created new glass pieces in partnership with the Centre International d’Art Verrier in Meisenthal, which he will present at his end-of-residency event. To these will be added other experimental creations and installations made in the studio with the aim of extending his vocabulary towards an idiosyncratic view of care, within a world currently on the way to re-mystification.
Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle Director of the contemporary Art center – La synagogue de Delme
