Noctambules

Caroline Mesquita is one of the most intriguing and innovative young sculptors to emerge out of France. Mesquita was born in 1989 in Brest, and she currently lives and works in Marseille. A jubilant disquiet presides over her sculptural work, which navigates the increasing intimacy between man and machine as our forms, materials, and desires frolic. Her combinatory practice marries the physicality of altered, oxidized, and painted copper and brass sheets with theatrical playfulness and socio-cultural reference. Mesquita’s ensuing experiments in metallurgy and materiality result in life-size figures interacting with one another in carnivalesque vignettes that slide between Hellenistic sculpture, baroque ballet, and melancholic parade. Even as she has more recently experimented with different chemical treatments to create a wider spectrum of color, as well as the medium of cut paper to interject lightness and fancy, she retains a distinctive boldness in her approach to space and the object—orchestrating immersive environments that pull us in, wittingly or not, to the questions being posed.

Produced for the Blaffer Art Museum in Housten, the site-specific installation 'Noctambules' will now be presented at the Centre d'Art Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

The third and last chapter of 'Parallels' entitled 'Part 3: Central Heating Visions'. The subtitle is an evocation of the heating factory that once occupied the building but also suggests the notion of perception, whether sentient, cognitive or extrasensory, and refers to the imagination, utopia, apparition…

'Parallels' follows a particular pattern: the rooms host works by the artists and invite the public to navigate in spaces, each (in-)dependant on the others. They are distributed by a red glowing corridor looking like an artery, a vessel created by the duo Barbezat-Villetard. A series of openings inaugurate new rooms each time and these fragments, presented in a continuous flow evokes, in their multiplicity, this very same collective exhibition.