Contemporary art: an exhibition explores consciousness

Can art shed light on the vast questions over which scholars are struggling? This is the amusing hypothesis made by “Conscience, are you there?”, a collective exhibition organized at Wall Space under the guidance of the sculptor Vincent DuBois, the lawyer Nicolas Capt and the patron and gallery owner Caroline Freymond. Deliberately outdated, the title of the hanging reverses the trendy statements that contemporary art is often fond of.

Religion and science have tried it, philosophy and morality have tried their luck: but defining the concepts of soul, spirit or consciousness, if indeed they evoke the same thing, has always resisted to human thought. Today, science has launched an attack on the concept of consciousness alone, while, at the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating all computer processes – with or without synthetic consciousness, no one knows. knows.

For or against death

In order to carry out their somewhat zany enterprise, the trio invited a group of visual artists, mainly from Geneva, to embroider on the theme. Known signatures, such as John Armleder Or Albertine, rub shoulders with newer talents, such as Julien Aubert. The presentation is accompanied by a work in which several voices converse who are not frightened by controversy – the psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard, Olivia Ronen, lawyer for the terrorist Salah Abdeslam, and the travel writer Sylvain Tesson.

This is the second part of the “Spectacular encounters» cooked up since 2021 by the three accomplices. “We like to look at themes as serious as they are impossible with a little humor and offbeat,” explains Vincent Du Bois, to whom we also owe the two editions ofOpen End at the cemetery of the Kings around immortality. The first chapter invited artists, authors and visitors to digress on the theme “for or against death”, and ultimately to decide by voting.”

Combining genres and disciplines, these dialogues include an exhibition, a publication, and the holding of an extravagant and performative private evening during the opening. “The idea being to confront questions without possible clear answers, we do not claim to resolve anything, but invite very different perspectives to ask themselves,” continues the sculptor. I like to blur artistic and intellectual families.”

A series of colored gouaches ofAlbertine occupies the first level of the gallery founded by collectors Caroline and Eric Freymond. The Geneva illustrator evokes the unconscious with dreamlike brushstrokes, making solitary characters float under fluffy skies attached by the head to a bubble evoking dreams.

Three works by Julien Aubert face them: working in black and white with a mathematical rhythm on the pattern of the bark – which, like consciousness, constitutes a link between the intimate and the social world – the painter has also created a small sculpture with of chrysalis, soliciting the visitor’s intuition like a Rorschach test.

Before going down the stairs, a bronze Gianni Motti depicts the arm of its creator holding a pine cone, a motif used by the Mesopotamian civilization to represent the pineal gland, believed to hold the esoteric powers of wisdom. Downstairs, John Armleder has suspended on a metal wire a bric-a-brac of objects that one might encounter in a prison (umbrella, broom, mop, orange peels) in a nod to the objector of condemned conscience that he was in his young years.

While Jonathan Delachaux shows a video where a virtual character sees himself guided by an intelligence less artificial than we believe, Caroline Freymond embroidered on the textile mathematical formulas and unusual cross-stitch words – “catGPT”, for example – causing a charming collision between craftsmanship and high tech.

Universality of the gesture

In the last room, three marble pieces by Vincent Du Bois sit alongside an installation ofEric Van Hove. By hybridizing an Italian-made pump motor with various woods and metals finely crafted in Morocco, the second links complex worker know-how from the north and south of the Mediterranean, erasing cultural polarities to emphasize the universality of human gesture.

As for the first, he placed a cube-shaped brain and a hand outstretched towards the sky opposite each other, called “Planned Obsolescence”: “I linked them because paleontology observes that they developed together, indicates the artist. Evolution took millions of years to develop the hand, a hypercomplex tool used to make clicks. Will the future produce more rational brains that can be conveniently stored on the shelf?

On the wall is also displayed a QR code engraved in the white rock, torn from digital to anchor itself in the material. Having become useless, since illegible, the drawing, rendered to the hazards of the sculptor’s chisel, has nothing left for it except its strange beauty of a hieroglyphic bas-relief.

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