Tripod or the Launching of Reality

“Tripod or the Launching of Reality ” is an aquatic scene in which Aurélie Menaldo invites us to enter.

In this theatre, we think we recognize objects, we think we have already seen them yesterday, at home, in our daily lives, in our neighbour’s apartment. We believe we can name them with our vocabulary but, immediately, we lose them and they escape us.

The assembly, the display, the drawing, shift and alienate the forms, pushing them into the unreality of a formal game associated with the naivety of a glance. The artist thinks about the honesty of visual forms, pays attention to a few oddities and shifts the classic and everyday perspectives.

Her world is disillusioned. In the studio, the objects she accumulates await their history. They lose their initial function, they retreat in the face of their primary utility and temporality.

The objects gathered in the exhibition trace a colourful visual path, create a few synecdoches (each small part of sculpture bringing us back to a wider context of the object’s previous life), outline an olfactory path: her sculptures have rotted, deteriorated, they stink, too, sometimes. The artist seems to have forgotten them beforehand, in the water, in the corner of a room, before bringing them back to life at an event.

Here, they will fit in well.

Aurélie’s work tells us about the history of things. She composes stories for the objects and bodies that surround her. She knows they are ageing, ugly, ashamed. She sees them together or alone, she composes worlds for them, living memories. In her work, as in life, the subjects live and die.

They travel through the times and the legends that we try to attribute to them. 

These times and legends come from us, from the visitors, from Aurélie herself, and also from others such as scientists, commissioners or divers.

Because it’s the divers, too, to whom somehow we owe the presence of this exhibition, for reviving the three “modules”, previously buried at the bottom of a river following an accident in 2016 and left, thus, submerged, for a year.

In this space of the Antibrouillard, Aurélie Menaldo, unfolds clues from the times of her sculptures, opens a fictitious-submarine-museum in honour of the history of her objects for which she sculpts a past and a storyline more than a shape.

For “ Tripod or the Launching of Reality“, the artist transforms this anecdote, this news item for a work of art, into an exhibition. She builds similarities and links between them. She leaves the Arve fish, brought to the surface with its “modules” to rot on a shelf, exposes exploratory research patterns prior to the attempt to get out of the water, transmits to us the marks of a methodical investigation that seems to be unveiled under the showcase: leads us from clues to quibbles, plunges us into the setting of the own myth of her work.

Exhibition at L’Antibrouillard art space, Gaillard, 2018