Octave Rimbert-Rivière’s work is the result of unlikely chimerical
gatherings: accumulations, juxtapositions, experimentations with
scales and inversions. Artisanal refinement meets the mechanics of
mass industrial production while the triviality of everyday objects
is combined with artistic and popular references.
The aesthetics of Octave Rimbert-Rivière’s art is imbued with
satire. A «pot pourri» etymologically speaking, the artist’s
successive distortions create a virtual space merging different
temporalities. The baroque, mannerist, and pop artifices play out in
his installations, where grotesque humor alternates between being
enough and too much. By covering his tracks, the artist invents
narrations where all is hidden in order to be better revealed, where
embellishment masks as much as it discloses.
Octave Rimbert-Rivière outlines an enigmatic territory, one
connected to other realities, where the absence of hierarchies and
the contamination of forms evokes a familiar feeling as exciting as
it is disturbing. This hybridism presents us with a dazzling liberty
dripping with excess. Yet, everything also seems to lead us
progressively towards a derailment of some kind, a distressing
malfunction. Immoderation reveals the absence which surrounds it.
As a result, we are not sure whether we are looking at a disaster
movie or a carnival, whether it has already happened or not, but we
suspect that the landscape’s apparent tranquility hides a latent
explosion: the bliss of the chaos to come.
Text by Marie Béchetoille
In dark corridors neon lights are blinking.
Walking and discovering, without objectives,
without guns, without enemies.
Holding the magic mug with the gentle green vapors,
and following the traces of this hollow Temple.
No weight, no future, no flesh,
Just few textures stretched virtually on a mesh.
Empty statues, static and deformed
and rough surfaces of monumental clay towers,
are composing rooms of this caricatural space
where you are trapped with no way to escape.
Sound created in collaboration with Andrea Gutteres