Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves
Soleil martien - Installation - 2019
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 21
Installation
ust as the impressionists went into the fields to capture natural light, with her Martian Sun series, the artist embraces the landscape through a “tele- vision” (distant gazing) process: “I work with a distant landscape which is thousands of millions of kilometers away, my depth of field is augmented by the sensors of the martian rovers and the astrophysician’s models.” Our gaze and our minds contemplate an “extra-terrestrial horizon”: “To watch the sun setting is to experience the skyline. The closer you want to get, the further it will move back.”
Why Mars? Because though no life on Mars has been discovered as yet Mars has never ceased to inspire. It is a metaphor of otherness. Echoing Continuum a film of a sunset on Mars in homage to Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) and set to a score of the seminal electronic composer, inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, her Martian Sunset and other pieces touching on the motif of the Red Planet, such as the Martian Sun series, delve into the theme of horizon as frontier. “Mars has been the starting point of scientific research on extraterrestrial life. Studying its environment and atmosphere will help us find out whether there could be any traces of existence in extra- solar systems. Notions of the cosmological horizon dating from the Big Bang or Giordano Bruno’s Infinity of Worlds (1584) have as from now been taken into account in the research of biosignatures on exoplanets.” (...)
Sean Rose
Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves
An artist whose chief material is light, Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves is interested in the optical and acoustic sciences, as well as in astrophysics and the sciences of perception and cognition. Her works draw on phenomenological knowledge of the real, questioning the process of vision and the conditioning of our gaze. Born in Athens in 1979, she lives and works in Paris.
Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou – Nuit Blanche – Sorbonne Art Gallery – Le Centquatre 104, Némo (Paris) – New Art Space/Sonic Acts (Amsterdam) – Watermans Arts Centre (London) – Elektra (Montreal) – OCAT (Shanghai) – ICAS (Dresden) – Aram Art Museum (Goyang /Korea) – Day For Night (Houston)…
