For over twenty years, S\u00e9bastien Cliche has developed a protean practice\u200a\u2014\u200aencompassing installations, videos, and mechanical devices\u200a\u2014\u200aaround the notion of control, as well as its loss. At the heart of his work, with its often uncluttered style evoking an operating room or laboratory, Cliche examines the beauty that emerges from the tension between order and chaos. Loops and playing with scale (his fetish strategies) allow him to reconcile these paradoxes and generate alterations, transformations, even degenerations, which, in turn, bring other layers of meaning to the work. These subtle visual mechanisms are part of a poetics of detail, where every element, however tenuous, becomes a bearer of meaning. Throughout his practice, Cliche examines structures of thought as much as techniques, old or new, while proposing a critical reading of systems that preserve and transmit knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this vein, Tableau des enregistrements<\/em> (2024), Champ d\u2019\u00e9lagage<\/em> (2024), and La Temp\u00e9rature de l\u2019information<\/em> (2023\u201324) explore decomposition as a process of material, symbolic, and conceptual transformation. The installations feature materials and objects\u200a\u2014\u200abooks, slides, archive boxes\u200a\u2014\u200athat are subjected to slow erosion by a saline solution. Encrusted with efflorescence, dictionaries freeze, manuals sclerotize, and index cards crystallize, rendering inaccessible and obsolete the knowledge held within. By radically altering our often unfavourable view of alteration and degradation, these growths of crystals take on agency. Here, decomposition is as much intellectual as it is material: the erasure of knowledge simultaneously opens the way for new interpretations, suggesting the evolving, mutant, non-linear nature of memory. Through strange, seductive, and critical bricolages, Cliche plunges the audience into sublime spaces where fiction, function, and sensorial experience interweave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Cliche, decomposition is not an end in itself; it\u2019s a dynamic mode of reconfiguration. His work stages environments where nothing is fixed\u200a\u2014\u200aneither objects nor ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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