Désastre des astres

Lucien Bitaux

In 2025, CHRONIQUES dedicates a monographic exhibition to Lucien Bitaux, winner of the Vasarely Prize at the CHRONIQUES Biennial at the Vasarely Foundation.

Scattered around the Fondation Vasarely, mobile installations resemble archaeological dig sites: digging in search of an ancestral time. Inspired by the Bibémus quarries and the Sainte-Victoire mountains painted by Cézanne, motorized structures vacillate between rocky chaos and mineral geometry.

From astronomy to geology, the representation of the past seems to take on a mathematical and abstract aspect. Imbued with scientific schemes ranging from galaxy spectra to crystalline systems, the “Disaster of the Stars” exhibition reveals an ancestral age of ordered and repeated forms, symmetrical and regular, behind the disorder we imagine. The movements of the sculptures transform the roughness of the stones into a mesh reminiscent of Victor Vasarely’s motifs.

The strata that make up these mobile elements are mirrors: as in astronomy, they reflect the past directly, capturing light from a distant era. The result is a landscape combining geometric and chaotic figures in a continuous rhythm, like the mechanism of a clock. Despite the clues left by fossil radiation and geological layers, ancestral time seems impossible to measure, leaving us with the illusion of a world that can be explained by images.

An exhibition produced by CHRONIQUES in partnership with the Vasarely Foundation and Cerege (Centre de recherche et d’enseignement des géosciences de l’environnement), with the support of the City of Aix-en-Provence.