Following their first collaboration in 2010, Julien Tiberi and Aurélien Mole are once again combining their respective approaches and works. For this occasion, a new protagonist appears, a certain Sir Thomas Trope, who lends his aura to the eponymous exhibition. The meaning of this tutelary figure cannot be found in his life or works, whose narrative does not yet belong to any history. Instead, it is through homophony, or elementary wordplay, that we find a possible entry point into the mechanics of this exhibition. Thus, through an initial metamorphosis of words and their meanings, the noble character gives way to a small optical illusion device, the thaumatrope (from the Greek thaumazo {θαυμάζω}, meaning to be amazed or to be the object of amazement, and tropos {τρόποϛ}, which in its original meaning means a turn, thus indicating a movement, and by extension a turn of phrase or reasoning), a primitive technology of animated images which, through rapid rotation, allows the shapes arranged on opposite sides of the same piece of cardboard to come together.

Extrapolated to the scale of the HO gallery, this toy, emblematic of 19th-century cabinets of curiosities and a modest precursor to the cinematograph, inspired the artists to design a display for a selection of works from both fields, mainly two-dimensional works, images, or drawings, some pre-existing and others created for the occasion. Beyond its function as a support, the device acts as a matrix, materializing a principle of connecting the works to each other, as it previously presided over their selection or creation. The specific form of this structure incorporates a set of multiple rotations that opens up the possibility of various configurations of space, but also of the meaning of the works themselves, which are also capable of being reversed, so that their obvious or implicit meanings are literally brought into play according to the different arrangements of the whole.

Combined within this framework, the works of Julien Tiberi and Aurélien Mole interact without being subsumed by the univocality of a constructed fiction. In the wake of the play on words that initiates the exhibition, they allow themselves to hint at meaning for the pleasure of letting it run its course, even if it comes to nothing. In this respect, the exhibition is less about staging a form of discourse than it is about providing a tool for combinatorial vision and reading. At the very least, we can glimpse the versatile reflection of a certain tropism shared by the two artists, contemporary enthusiasts of more or less verified fables, curious objects of uncertain authenticity, supposed exhibitions, and other enigmas in the making.

Anyone who has had the opportunity to handle a thaumatrope may, once the wonder of the flashing image produced by the rapid succession of images and the famous phenomenon of retinal persistence has worn off, have noticed another effect of this small device: when at rest, the elements separated from their complementary counterparts form a collection of strange visions, autonomous shapes with enigmatic meanings, such as a vase, a levitating bouquet, a horse with a hole in it, a one-legged child, a bald skull, or a flying wig. The astonishment they provoke is not unrelated to the ambiguous pleasure that can be found in the aesthetics of the absurd, or in the practice of rebuses, when a collection of symbols and shapes suggests a meaning that remains unresolved.


Camille Videcoq