Sixty works dated from 1992 to the present, some made specifically for this exhibition, offer a survey of the visual work of Rainier Lericolais, who is both an artist and a musician—a creator, one might say, of curiosities. Though he uses humble materials and rudimentary or somewhat outmoded techniques, he nevertheless produces singular, bizarre objects that are able both to surprise and to confound viewers. He has, for instance, attempted to “cast” both water and explosions. For the series “Tentative de moulage d’eau” (Attempt to Cast Water), 2009, the artist poured hot paraffin onto water. The paraffin hardened into irregular and entirely crumpled forms, offering views of the forces that were confronted in the meeting of these immiscible materials. In another series, “Tentative de moulage d’explosion” (Attempt to Cast Explosion), 2009, the artist placed firecrackers inside blocks of porcelain paste and lit them, engraving the impact of the explosions into the malleable material. These are certainly more than simple children’s games or amusing physics experiments: They are poetic and moving attempts to materialize the immaterial, to impress the print of ungraspable phenomena and to bring them into the field of the visible in a way strange and strong enough to exceed any account of the processes that brought them into being. That poetry is what gives these objects their fascination, despite their apparent triviality.

Although the variety of Lericolais’s propositions might at first be disorienting, one soon perceives constants: heterogeneity itself, the dialectic that is tied between effacement and visibility, or obliteration and revelation. In the artist’s several portraits, the generous and energetic brushstrokes would, to a rushed viewer, evoke expressionist painting and the deformations it implements; the chromatic range even brings to mind Egon Schiele. However, these are magazine pages or prints where the ink has been diluted with trichloroethylene or water: It is when it wears away that photography becomes painting; it is when it loses its precision and fidelity to the model that the image gains density. Similar effects are produced in Mariées (Brides), 2006, a large mural composed from lines of glue. First the adhesive is applied to magazine pages (with a glue gun) in undulating arabesques that hug the curves of the feminine silhouettes in the images they bear; then the glue is lifted off, taking with it a thin colored layer: Both drawing and colors are thus taken from mass media, but used to produce an object that, despite its poor means, evokes the intricacy of lace. Appearances are decidedly deceiving. The visitor is, in this case and throughout the exhibition, placed before the undefined, even more than the ambiguous: What, in actuality, is the nature of what he sees? And moreover, is seeing the adequate term to designate the experience thus offered to him, which is at once sensorial and mental?

—Guitemie Maldonado

Translated from French by Molly Stevens.