Rodolphe Alexis – From the Dark

The sound dimension has now become an established part of contemporary artists’ practice, often how-ever as a simple, sensitive extension of visual practices. For example, in video art and multimedia installations. Artist Rodolphe Alexis, for his part, considers the sensation of sound to be primary to his approach: for him, it is a powerful means of accessing the world, but also a powerful means of sharing experience. Responding to the invitation of Luxfer Open Space, From the Dark exhibition features some twenty recent works, most of which are sound-based, forming a journey through the gallery building, from cellar to attic, that calls on several forms of attention: listening and looking, reading and speaking, critical thinking and daydreaming, imagination and materiality.

Using the gesture of recording as a starting point, the artist’s practice is open to many forms, from com-position to performance, installation, radio and photography. Rodolphe Alexis uses both direct capture (field recording) and studio elaboration (sound design, composition), all of which are incorporated into simple devices in the exhibition room.

The mix of voices, aural landscape, animal vocalizations, words, people, things found and objects collect-ed provides a documentary dimension for the visitor. For, more than ever in an uncertain world, and according to a temptation shared by many, the artist borrows in his own way from the practices of anthropologists, convinced that others’ use of the world is an illuminating reflection of our own use.

Rodolphe Alexis talks about “audiography”, a form of notation that allows moments and experiences tobe shared by shifting between languages and media, sounds and forms, between the intimate and the public, between the singular and the collective. Driven by an initial personal attraction as a naturalist, attached to an ecological, geographical and human context, the artist has been exploring a territory in the Brazilian Amazon —the Indigenous Land of September 7th, in the state of Rondônia— for more than two years, in collaboration with the Paiter Surui people and often in collaboration with Eloïse Guénard. From the Dark exhibition is an attempt to transform a collection of sound and material notes, testimonies and understandings in sensitive displays.

After the dark space of an electroacoustic work in the Luxfer Open Space’s cellar, the works are often embodied in forms derived from material culture and sound. Through the sonorization of everyday objects, the restitution of fragments of speech collected on site, and the collection of natural objects specific to the Amazonian forest reinvested by the artist’s eye, the itinerary renders sensitive a fragile mental, cultural and social universe within ecosystems, distant but made manifest to our necessary awareness of the world.

curator: Christophe Domino