Alexandre Bavard, Arthur Hoffmann, V.O.I.D. at Galerie Au Roi, Paris

V.O.I.D. by Alexandre Bavard and Arthur Hoffmann, curated by a-topos’, at Galerie Au Roi, Paris, 30/04/2025–10/05/2025.

Exhibition text:
From the very entrance, a sensation of immersion takes hold. The gaze sharpens, footsteps slow, ab- sorbed by a plastic dispositif that functions as a coherent whole: every element vibrates, resonates, and engages the entire body. The two-headed installation intrigues, unsettles, and defies categorization, an immersive construction that resists immediate naming. Alexandre Bavard and Arthur Hoffmann lead us on a meandering journey through reconstructed lands- capes and reinterpreted urban zones. They sketch a fragmentary map of the city—its interstices, voids, wastelands, empty spaces, suspended construction sites, and buildings consigned to oblivion. Between ruins and margins, they advance like tireless surveyors, urban navigators exploring cities as shifting ar- chipelagos or as fields of experimentation and play. In V.O.I.D., the two artists delve into the concept of the non-place, dear to Michel de Certeau and Marc Augé—transitional, neutral spaces without social or historical anchoring. These places of waiting, erasure, and in-betweenness are revealed here as thresholds, thresholds of experience and sensitive reactivation. Upon entering the gallery space, one is confronted with a monumental scaffold, a true tubular mesh. A latticed grid, almost evanescent, through which the gaze both passes and is contained. Here, flee- tingness is questioned, as well as imbalance and the constant tension between stability and precarity between balance, fragility, and the ephemeral. These scaffolds become playful modules, to traverse, approach, and momentarily inhabit. They or- chestrate random paths, prompting the viewer’s movement, transforming them into a spatial actor. The space is manipulated like a drawing stretched into three dimensions between surface and volume, plane and sculpture, center and periphery. Evoking Sol LeWitt, the grids become matrices, the surfaces sup- ports for memory : graffiti, scars, incisions, urban imprints and traces. The dialogue between the two artists invites us to traverse overlooked zones, to rediscover spaces filled with memory or forgetfulness, where intimacy and historical traces intertwine. They collect found objects, raw materials, everyday fragments, or digital artifacts, in a quasi-archaeological, obsessive approach. In this sensory experience, their works interweave materials that are sometimes rough, sometimes sub- tle, echoing these “non-places” full of hidden potential. The exhibition space becomes a laboratory, a threshold of transformation. Hoffmann and Bavard orchestrate a delicate choreography fusing presence and disappearance, accelerations and slow motion. At the intersection of the living and the mechanical, they capture the friction of the world, the subtle metamorphoses of the real.
Bavard: combining classical materials with technological elements, he activates foundational myths of Greek and Roman antiquity, silvered bas-reliefs, sculptures, and masks, interlaced with contemporary myths of the digital and urban, fractured screens, a motorcycle, tires, cables. He stages the link between artisan and artist, between techniques of the past and those of today, between ancient and modern cos- mogonies, and past and present symbolisms.
Hoffmann: using photographic overlays projected onto aluminum plates, solid or perforated to let light pass through, he focuses his lens on secret landscapes. He seizes forgotten layers and remnants on the surfaces of buildings, initiating urban palimpsests. Through this process, he diverts and appropriates elements of the past, bearers of intimate or collective histories, fragments of unknown memories and intertemporal moments.
V.O.I.D.: a dual movement, a bridge, an exchange between two visions and two ways of being in the world—in resonance with Barnett Newman’s claim that the artist was there before the philosopher.
Gaya Goldcymer, April 2025