About Bounoure & Genevaux, French contemporary artists

At the origin, there is an imprint, that of two bodies on a surface, that of Guillaume Bounoure and Chloé Genevaux, a duo of artists who consider the fold as the germ of everything.

The works of Bounoure and Genevaux emerge from this primitive gesture, that of folding, that of the contraction of the material, the mirrored aluminum. Like a vital impulse, the fold is borrowed from an energy that shapes and acts on reality.

With the series Simplicity, the result of the fold is at first sight physical, the surface of the works functions like a mirror thanks to the laws of symmetry. The reflections are as many points of view that intertwine in each other leading the viewer to a multiple and labyrinthic perception.

The space extends and unfolds, the outside introduces itself to the inside, the marks blur generating a synthesis of profiles. (1) " All experience, whatever its scope, begins with an impulse or rather like an impulse". (2) An impulse which is born from a need and which pushes to the action. There is a creative movement and there is mine as a spectator. While strolling, I activate the potentialities of the work, that is to say its multiple variations. Who am I?  I am a leg, a bust, a fragment of face, an elbow. I am a decomposed whole which aspires to recompose itself. I am a pleiad of reflections, the mirage of my own reality. I am this fold which consecrates the duality of the body and the soul, of the visible and the invisible, of the unity and the multitude. I seek me, I approach, I play. I am a projection, an anecdote. I am a memory of the future.(3)

Simultaneously, persists this underlying reality that as a spectator, I try to seize since my entrance in the gallery. The stirrings of my soul. The photographic work of the duet, comes thus to rearrange this truth which escapes me, by freezing it. The photo, similar to a filter and such a malleable, distorted, flexible memory, is made the stigma of the existence, which under the effect of the fold is metamorphosed.

In the manner of a kaleidoscope - that Alphonse Giroux (4) presented under the name of transfigurator - and of the jerky images produced by this machine to amaze, Bounoure and Genevaux compose works with infinite visual possibilities, modifying our image of the world in an unforeseeable measure. But beyond the relationship to reality, it is to ourselves that the duo confronts us, to this “body that has become a kaleidoscope that presents changing figures of truth at every step" (5). The images appear, convulsive, dazzling, unceasingly renewed, like a veil which is torn allowing to reach a knowledge until then offended by our habit of the things.”

FRAGMENTS OF INFINITY

Margot Rieder, independent curator November 2020