Aurélien Potier is an artist with no preferred medium. He is not a poet or a sketch artist, a sculptor or a performer… He is all of the above. His art consists of navigating within the void of what he is not and within the substance of what characterises him as a body, in the world in general and in the exhibition space in particular. These substances and voids, characterising the surrounding world to which he is connected, also exist within our bodily structures, our mouths, and our various orifices. All of which are zones through which the world can penetrate more or less painfully or voluptuously. Through which he purges himself.

 

His writing work enables him to establish connections with a given environment (that of a page, but also an exhibition space), by evacuating what plagues the mind through agitation, anxiety, or coaxing. It reflects the external and internal pressures endured by the artist in a disjointed and fast-paced style, without reducing this relationship with the world to a perpetual violence. This language highlights a certain existential crisis capable of generating a vital creative force. Aurélien Potier is therefore immersed in an inextricable contradiction, the one which our era imposes on us and to which he strives to give form.

 

His drawings represent beings affected by stammering situations, sometimes tending towards the grotesque. Often deformed, these creatures are at once lascivious and hunchbacked, belching. The gap between drawing and writing is completely porous for the artist, who does not seek to differentiate them. His handwritten poems are so illegible that they become abstract, deliberately impenetrable drawings. Only his typescript poems can be read, so as to interact with his inner world, the rest is nothing but emptiness and speculation. The line therefore travels – more or less formed, more or less linear – and sometimes leaves the wall to spread into the space via thin metal cables suspended by sharp hooks, forming loops that run out just as they reach the floor, under the effects of the earth’s attraction. Drawing becomes sculpture, without really pulling it off, because Aurélien Potier does not seek to enduringly fill the space or to impose a form there but, once again, to travel within it, thus affirming the ephemeral and unstable nature of things and bodies. His performances subtly confirm this approach to space, in which the artist very simply settles himself in, accompanied by a technical device amplifying his voice, which becomes the material of the work, penetrating his audience’s minds and bodies.

 

In this way, Aurélien Potier’s art seeks the means of representing complex notions, such as the body/mind relationship as well as a certain relationship with the earth and the landscape. These relationships, existing without images, give rise to profound questions for the artist, who is constantly asking himself how to move, where to go, and how to connect himself to his environment. Concerned with an ecology of body/environment relationships, his art shapes questions as constructive as they are melancholic, since the dark appearance of his artworks are not incompatible with an optimistic vision of the future. His time in Lindre-Basse has afforded him the opportunity to delve further into his examination of the body/landscape and deepen his relationship to geology, his fascination for the darkness of caves, as a metaphor for the interior of the body, but also as a place that regurgitates and purges itself.