The exhibition as a magnetic field: muted forces seem to have been activated here. The works staged as a duo by Julien Tibéri and Aurélien Mole at the Fondation Hippocrène attract or repel each other like magnets. They create a territory around them that, as soon as you cross it, seems to subject you to a micro-power: gravitational, centrifugal, telluric. Is it because of their effect that the Kongo fetish has lost its metal pins, which Aurélien Mole planted in the base that supports it as a decorative garland, devoid of any esoteric power? Was it their magic that finally emptied the court of its accused, leaving behind only an abstraction of forms (Le vide, Julien Tibéri)? By what ritual has the solemn man borrowed from the 20s photographer August Sander been transformed into a tattooed male, with his abstract flower on his face drawn by Aurélien Mole, borrowed from the make-up of another model by the German master?

Strange phenomena are at work here, and elective affinities emerge between the pieces beyond reason. Julien Tiberi's Fuori Fuoco, for example, is set against Aurélien Mole's The Individualist. A microphone panics on the floor, spinning in circles. It is accompanied by the sound of an extract from the film Deconstructing Harry, in which a director, played by Woody Allen, becomes blurred by anguish. As the microphone loses its sharpness under the effect of the rotating speed, a palimpsest of this metaphor emerges, of a reality in search of the right definition. And perhaps, in subtext, a questioning of the role of the creator today. Fuori Fuoco... This title, which means blurred, but also out of focus, or more literally ‘out of the fire’ (because etymology also has its magnetic abilities), could just as easily be adapted to Mole's Individualist, inspired by a King Vidor film evoking a Frank Lloyd Wright-style figure of the architect: a portrait of Gary Cooper drawing a plumb line to himself, as if he were being pointed at as an accused. Off-screen, in fact, is the actor's ambiguous position on McCarthyism. Two unsavoury individuals.

Further on, a quasi-spiritistic force is set in motion. In a drawing from the Salon series, Julien Tiberi has inserted what could be the appearance of a work from the following century into an engraving in a style imitating the nineteenth century: a luminous circle, which seems to emerge from the image to virtually land on the wall, courtesy of Aurélien Mole. The same journey through time, between an engraving of the aurora borealis torn from the Romantic century to end up in a curved box of sandblasted glass, which only partially reveals it (Het Noorderlicht, Aurélien Mole) and The Sound of the Sound of Science (Julien Tiberi): from a frozen aquarium, topped by a 1937 radio, emerges the sound of a film by Painlevé, ‘Mathematical Images of the Fourth Dimension’. The artist has re-recorded it underwater. All temporalities are blurred. A disorientated utopia, a conceptual jetlag...

A few years ago, André Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote in Les champs magnétiques: ‘Tonight, there are two of us in front of this river overflowing with our despair. We can't even think any more (...) My dear friend, why don't you want to say anything more about your watertight memories? The air that only yesterday filled our lungs is becoming unbreathable. All we have to do is look straight ahead, or close our eyes: if we turned our heads, vertigo would creep up on us. It is precisely vertigo that Mole and Tiberi have chosen, the vertigo of other panic-stricken times.

Emmanuelle Lequeux