streifzug is a German word for which I cannot find a translation. It carries the connotation of fleeting, ephemeral. But in German, Streifzug also has to do with touch as exploration. I don't know exactly why this word came to mind, perhaps because I am familiar with the works of Pierre Auzias and Pierre_Alix Nicolet with too much volatility to do anything other than touch them with words. But perhaps also because Nébulosité seeks the touch of what escapes. Nebel, fog, in German also has an untranslatable ambiguity; its palindrome is life. It is an atmospheric structure, a feeling, a nuance. Even though in this exhibition it is obviously about transitions, processes, these works do not tell the obvious but the unexpected, the overlooked. Wisdom is not always bright, on the contrary, it can be fatal, turning on the high beams in case of fog. Düster, gloomy. That it also has no equivalent tells as much about these works as about the inaccessibility they touch, about how hands grasp the fog while disappearing into it. This vagueness, not in the precision of research or its expression, but in its distrust of the too clear, the closed, and above all, the univocal, leads to the question: a body that decomposes until it is still a body? How many possibilities does it contain, what can it be translated into, broken down, redefined when its form is attacked. The fact that weather affects differently than iron, than a hand or light, makes this exhibition a kaleidoscope of decay. And seeing through it changes every definition. Because has anyone ever thought that clouds are the musty sky? Or a breath captured on glass. Branches in winter are skeletons, as much as a dragonfly's wing is a leaf's carcass, and the photographs perhaps the fermentation of light. What remains and Nigredo are both heads, each detached from its own body and oriented differently, attached in this deformation. Injuries and damage speak of possibilities, of what happens when air comes into contact with what is otherwise a vacuum, and dialectically of the fact that everything already contains its opposite, like oxygen becomes poison when bronze oxidizes. Unheimlich, yet another word that defies translation, is the title of Pierre Auzias' drawing and the sensation that arises when suddenly something familiar is no longer recognized. The sketches, something not yet finished, continued by mold, are spatially mirrored to Pierre_Alix's installation, whose photographs are the continuation of the sculpture through light. Both parts frame this exhibition with a line that actually breaks its boundary. The fact that the sketches are the beginning of the sculpture and the photographs are its continuation also shows that one does not have the last word, and not because there is no translation for this. Like Nigredo, which from a photographic print becomes a false X-ray image that does not show bones but soft parts or overlaid shadows, Nébulosité in its composition of decay touches what otherwise cannot be grasped.

KATHARINA KLEIN