views from the exhibition L’esprit de l’atelier, MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier, FR (photo : Marc Domage)
“Tristan Chevillard explores liminal zones and narratives that exist on the margins of history. His repertoire of forms, like the materials he works with, casts doubt on their nature and temporality. He searches within the interstices to imagine counter-histories, drawing on resilient or forgotten beings such as fallen pigeons, fragile insects, and monsters from another age, which he recomposes using the relics of the capitalist era.
The installation La Catedrala dels Vencuts [The Cathedral of the Vanquished, in Languedocien, an Occitan dialect], produced for the exhibition, consists of strange illuminated signs. Gargoyles are meant either to ward off or to attract Lucifer, the first of the fallen angels, to the exterior, while the light of these makeshift stained-glass windows evokes the divine presence within the choir of a church or cathedral. Here, Tristan Chevillard introduces pagan Occitan monsters such as the Drac or the Tarasque, which haunts the marshes near Tarascon. He reconciles worlds that are often set in opposition: darkness and light, the divine and the profane, the medieval and the contemporary eras. Might the pigeons of our cities be fallen carrier pigeons, those once employed by feudal lords? They also allude to an episode in the studio of Djamel Tatah, where students returning from the holidays discovered a frightened pigeon that had left a few “souvenirs” on their canvases.”
The installation La Catedrala dels Vencuts [The Cathedral of the Vanquished, in Languedocien, an Occitan dialect], produced for the exhibition, consists of strange illuminated signs. Gargoyles are meant either to ward off or to attract Lucifer, the first of the fallen angels, to the exterior, while the light of these makeshift stained-glass windows evokes the divine presence within the choir of a church or cathedral. Here, Tristan Chevillard introduces pagan Occitan monsters such as the Drac or the Tarasque, which haunts the marshes near Tarascon. He reconciles worlds that are often set in opposition: darkness and light, the divine and the profane, the medieval and the contemporary eras. Might the pigeons of our cities be fallen carrier pigeons, those once employed by feudal lords? They also allude to an episode in the studio of Djamel Tatah, where students returning from the holidays discovered a frightened pigeon that had left a few “souvenirs” on their canvases.”
MO.CO. Panacée
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