Red
and black.
Life drive,
death drive.
And there the white!
The red and the black. Life impulse, death impulse. And there, the white! In the center lies the material. To its left, creativity – red – and to its right, method – black. The method fuels the system. It relies on numerous gears – capital, performance, optimization, the mold, all of which together nourish the machine. Creation, on the contrary, refers to the constellation, or to the spider's web – to interdependence. Neurons, plasticity, truth are linked to the body.
Trapped in this opposition, all our impulses, fears, and traumas, emptiness, lack, destruction, chaos. Since her studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Camille Sauer has been playing with the structures that surround us, whether political, economic, or social, dissecting them to reveal the threads, perhaps unraveling them and retying them differently, with her audience. The work is then codified – even encoded – and each visual element presented therein carries meaning. Together they form a network of signs, that is to say, both clues and symbols.
There is color, with red and black, shape, with the circle and the square, pyramidal or organic structures, fluidity or orthogonality. For the past decade, she has been sketching these structures, naming them, and articulating them on the pages of numerous notebooks, iterating them again and again, turning these meaningful diagrams into the matrix of her work. For the first time, she presents these drawings, as so many meta-architectures, or fundamental architectures – meaning that they reflect systems and all their rules, revealing the multiple invisible gears within them.
Meta-architectures presented on the walls, Camille Sauer has derived digital worlds, video game settings in which her avatar moves, or "reciprocal being" – her virtual alter ego – under our control. Like another way of entering the drawing, penetrating the matrix of our world, and exploring all its mechanisms, through her, or rather with her. In the center of the room, a sound object also requires public involvement. As an artist-composer, Camille Sauer conceives music as another way of embodying structure – the sound object is thus also an architecture, the embodiment of a system. By activating it, poetic speech, which is also political, is unleashed.
Echoing these exploratory devices, Camille Sauer presents "The Artistic Industry," an audiovisual opera that questions the role of the artist within our society. In an alternative world with environments inspired by a form of hyper-architectural and industrial planning, the artist finds herself – through her avatar – immersed in a productivist industry, causing the creation of new imaginaries through her narratives. A visual, poetic, and musical work, "The Artistic Industry" intersects her practices of writing, composition, and image creation, and encompasses all of her structural and political research, aiming to reveal the internal upheavals that may traverse an artist's life in their early years.
By dissecting the rules and processes that govern our daily lives, by showing them through play, poetry, video, or drawing, Camille Sauer seeks a place for the artist within our cultural systems, and more generally a scope for creation. Through her inner journey, this solitary adventure within an ambiguous industry, she probes the very possibility of artistic encounter, interference, and their effects on our perception of the world. This is arguably the foundation of her work, and the reason why her voice carries a particular importance today.
Grégoire Prangé
Lille, April 2024