Exhibition
SPATIAL AFFINIT - IES

Caisa Sandgren
Balthazar Ausset
Curated by Anna Donà / ADCurator
From 30 January to 27 February 2021

Affinity, attraction, analogy.
The word affinity - in all its nuances - evokes a natural or suitable relationship between beings and things.

The exhibition Spatial affinit-ies aims to explore the affinities inherent in the human experience of space and the objects that punctuate our lives. It is a question of rereading our daily rituals, of strolling over our gestures and intentions, of interpreting our perceptions.

Caisa Sandgren and Balthazar Ausset invest the Galerie Marie-Robin as a hybrid platform. Architectures, objects, containers and contents - thanks to their infinite relationships - generate a moving interior scene according to objective factors (light, seasons, sounds) and subjective ones (states of mind, gestures, memories).

Each work thus invites us to wander freely and to question the very nature of the impressions of the spaces experienced. What traces of reality are inscribed in our memories? Which others are - on the contrary - destined to disappear quickly?
These questions link the artists' proposals.

Caisa Sandgren crosses the boundary between being and thing through the representation of her personal places and their objects charged with history, presence or absence. However, in the latest series of drawings "Solkatt" 1, the memory - the raw material of figuration - also becomes a clue to be perceived, recognised and grasped until a different image is formulated.1 For the project Spatial affinit-ies, the artist continues her research by presenting a Constellation of linear metal sculptures. The line draws and transforms the exhibition space into a meta-space to be penetrated. Only, by diverting our perspectives, by diversifying our points of view, the thing reveals all its intimate colourations. (...)

Travelling through the affinities of the imaginary salon, Caisa Sandgren's projections cross paths with Balthazar Ausset's "Retinal Impression".

Ausset explores and exposes the surrounding world as an artist and an individual through the mise en abyme of his own codes. Faced with the concept Spatial affinit-ies, he creates a new series of moving sculptures by drawing his inspiration from an ordinary material: cardboard packaging.

The packaging traces the flows of consumption and fruition, as a vector of heterogeneous items. However, before any revelation, the object still refers to an imaginary dimension, so it conceals its interior. Balthazar Ausset uses cardboard-surface as a matrix in the creation of his plywood forms, while the cardboard-volume is the starting point for the photographic images printed on each support. From the object to its appearance, the artist opens the packages piled up in the imagined living room. A profusion of figures and consistencies will then parade before our eyes, from the organic to the mechanical, from the vegetable to the animal. Elements enveloping and in turn enveloped.

Spatial affinit-ies unravels the plurality of relationships through which the thing - subject, object, container - exists beyond the sensible and its own limits. The works of Caisa Sandgren and Balthazar Ausset are situated at the edges of these limits. They coexist in the gallery space, giving substance to other tangibles.

Affine propositions that are even more interesting when they determine other superimpositions, other separations until they reveal "the infinitely more than we can see". It is a question, as Sartre wrote in The Imaginary, of learning the objects as a synthesis of all these apparitions, of observing them, of going around them, of waiting for the "sugar to melt". 2

- Anna Donà

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1. H.Bergson, Histoire des théories de la mémoire, (1904), ed.Puf, 2018, p.115-120
2. J-P Sartre, L' imaginaire, (1940), ed.Gallimard, pp.23-24