L’Infini Turbulent

CHRONIQUES, an incubator for digital imagination, honors artist Boris Labbé at the Espace Culturel Départemental – 21 bis, Mirabeau and at the Musée des Tapisseries in Aix-en-Provence. This monographic diptych illustrates the richness of his artistic career: from animation to video installation, via set design and video mapping.

L’infini turbulent (turbulent infinity), a title borrowed from Michaux but so evocative of Boris Labbé’s work, brings together just over ten years of the artist’s audiovisual practice and experimentation.

Combining the use of digital moving-image techniques with those specific to animated cinema, the films and installations presented here form an original, bubbling language; a universe in perpetual (re)construction, bearing within itself the possibility of a possible disappearance.

For his exhibition at the espace culturel départemental – 21, bis Mirabeau, Boris Labbé presents two of his first animated works, Il(s) tourne(nt) en rond (2010) and Kyrielle (2011). These “youthful” works reveal the author’s themes and obsessions, developed later: a taste for the painting of the Flemish primitives, but also a barely concealed filiation with the classics of experimental animation, the invasion of space by characters, metamorphosis and a looping narrative.

In the gothic gallery of the Musée des Tapisseries, Boris Labbé recreates the set design he created for choreographer Angelin Preljocaj in 2020: Le lac des Cygnes. The video installation, rearranged, reworked and re-sounded, retains only the first part of the original title: Le Lac. The videos show primordial elements (water, smoke, clouds, birds, forest, architecture, a factory…) in constant tension with one another. The landscapes, often extremely dark, are both hyper-realistic and hyper-artificial. They confront us with the virtuality of the world, which we feel is on the verge of tipping over, and which may now be no more than a simulation or a mad construction.