Victor Villafagne
Near Life Experience - Installation - 2022
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 24
Near Life Experience is a film essay on the birth of forms, but in the form of sculptures. The word “form” comes from the Latin forma, and its Greek equivalent is “morphe.”
Morpheus is the goddess of prophetic dreams who puts men to sleep by caressing them with poppy flowers. Their bodies then become like the dead; they take shape, take position.
It is in this night that humans escaps from the machine of the gods, which governs the world, and are able in turn to follow up the tracks and keys offered by their imagination and make them real.
Near Life Experience is an attempt to solve my own obsessions.
Form is what is immersed in this liminal state, a critical state between idea and object, energy and matter. The nascent form tries as best it can to resist death: immobile, it is worn down by time; in motion, it is too fragile to resist the weight of time. The exhibition neutralises in order to better show, it is an atomic spraying machine in the service of abstraction. It gives birth to value and experience. It channels art, gives it a temporality and a space, it creates an economic system, from which trades emerge, knowledge is exchanged. The form always plays along with this space in the attempt to survive it. There is no truly rebellious act that can exist according to the sense of this space because nothing that tries to save its life is rebellious, just deeply alive. The forms try to explain to us how they survive, reproduce, infect people with the ideas they encrypt, and how they die. Art objects are objects of power and might, which they transmit and symbolize: this is the reproduction of substance through form.
Victor Villafagne
Victor Villafagne was born in Mont-de-Marsan in 1995 and lives and works in France. He develops sculptures in order to "resolve his own cinematic obsessions" by bringing into play relationships
of force and energy in forms that always generate an intimate relationship to sound. He describes his works as "energy batteries of awareness, taking the form of technological fossils": living entities that have a life of their own, before and after passing through his hands. Perceptual, psycho-acoustic and other cognitive effects play a role in the viewer's interaction with the artist and his work. Victor Villafagne is currently training at Le Fresnoy -- Studio national des arts contemporains where he presented his sculpture project *Near Life Experience *in 2022. His work has been shown at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2021), the Creux de l'Enfer in Thiers (2020) and the Czech Centre in Paris (2019, 2020).
In collaboration with Flora Bouteille, he has developed projects at Les Subsistances in Lyon and at the Lyon Biennale (2019), and at the Salon de Montrouge (2019). Together they also conceived the radio series "Le palais hermétique de la mémoire", the first episode of which was presented at the Ars Electronica festival. The continuation of the series was broadcast by the Centre d'Art Contemporain d'Ivry-le Crédac (2021).
