By combining erudite precision and slightly mannerist poetics, Aurélien Mole cultivates a form of dandyism that can be seen even in his research, which oscillates between historical and artistic references. He then gives his work the look of a sophisticated but fair work, because he plays to perfection with this tiny which gives things a slight gap with literalness. From there, the title of his proposal for the CAC Passerelle fits precisely into this semantic in-between, since “Benin” designates both the African country and the character of what is tolerable.

Somewhere lost between nonchalance and desire for exoticism, Aurélien Mole questions the history of art and techniques – photography in particular – with a view to reinvesting the dissociation between the artist and the researcher. The exhibition presents a film based on the work of Hippolyte Bayard, photographer and inventor to whom we owe the first photographic staging, with the famous "drowning" of 1840. Bayard, employee of the Ministry of Finance, spent lunch on the roof of the administration where he placed plaster statuettes on a black background facing a camera obscura, in order to obtain images that stood out in white on a black paper of his invention. As often in the experimental sciences in the 19th century, the artist takes precedence over the researcher, the plaster statuettes, simple motifs of an experiment, chosen for their whiteness, multiply by adopting unusual and unexpected positions.

In the end, the images that Bayard records describe a cabinet of curiosities made up of plaster figures, which owe their existence only to a part of unpredictability that any experimental research suggests. Here, in this case, a technique of two-dimensional transcription of reality makes it possible to build a kind of universal, minimalist and virtual museum. The film then proposes to observe in accelerated the course of the sun sweeping nine objects placed on a black background that we find in the exhibition.

From Bayard's perspective, Aurélien Mole questions the modes of existence and appearance of things, their tangibility in representation as well as their production. In this, the artist auscultates the reality of contemporary modernity. Indeed, in his study of representation and manufacturing processes through serial logics, questions arise relating to the notions of copy and original, facsimile, delegation of the artist's gesture and craftsmanship, that is to say, a set of motifs exemplifying the avatars of artistic modernity. However, by using techniques and tools that suggest digital devices, like the 3D printer or viral diffusion processes, the project inevitably extends into our contemporaneity.
The scenography put in place pursues this citational and critical logic. The artist deliberately chooses to invest the Quai, an emblematic space of a place now devoted to contemporary art and which bears the scars of its industrial past; the building now stands proudly against the sacrosanct white cube. Aurélien Mole obstructs it on the front with an imposing stage curtain to affix a museum scenography amalgamating the world of theatre, visual evasion devices and codes of modern hanging. The presentation shelves that level the space in a very modern perspective, both elegant and implacable, are a reference