Quelque part dans l’inachevé

Through their installation “Quelque part dans l’inachevé,” Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux appropriate that eponymous Rainer Maria Rilke quote in order to define their work as being in continuous reinvention; without conceptual or material limits, the creative process has no end. Wendt’s and Dufaux’s respective practices interweave to create a multisensory, intuitive and, moreover, moving mixture. The duo negotiates with temporality while the process of creation, representation, and reception are completely torn apart in perpetuity. The finality of the exhibition is no less discovered in its elaboration as it is also directly experienced; the proposals within, dwell as much on their own ruin as they suggest potential futures. After a performative and progressive exploration, the artists evoke all the possibilities of the incomplete: of the (un)finished (“l’inachevé”). Through the art of movement, they question the shared experiences of the post-human condition through (inter)actions applied to various constructed protean objects.

This “somewhere” (“quelque part”) — the space inside the gallery — is impalpable, elusive, and unstable. Wendt’s + Dufaux’s contributions lead to the creation of illusions, of realities otherwise inaccessible — and of allusive and fictitious aspirations. Immersive and contemplative through the variations in its scenery, the installation transposes its visitors into someplace else; a pop-apocalyptic universe. The senses of the viewer become captivated by the sensory characteristics of these objects. Visitors, therefore, become at once utopians and survivalists and participate then and there in a colourful mise-en-scène complicated by photographic and filmed images, pictorial and sculptural objects, which act to measure spatiotemporal reverberations. The performance, pre-rendered by Wendt and pre-recorded by Dufaux on the shores of Newfoundland last year, is twice over projected in the gallery, in two sequences of alternating order. Through a series of interventions, Sarah Wendt, without pretense, surveys the territory and guides the visitors into these arid lands. A landscape of frenetic sounds, incorporating the singular resonance of the French horn, intensifies the (in)actions the artist makes towards every one of these dreamlike objects.

For Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux, “l’inachevé” is a methodology that leads right into an infinite “quelque part”. 

— Jean-Michel Quirion