This diptych explores agarose, a gel extracted from red algae used in science to reveal DNA fragments. For the artist, this material serves as a fascinating bridge between the living world and high technology, a form of ‘scientific writing’ that makes the invisible architecture of life visible. The work pivots on a series of contrasts: the solid and the liquid, the organic and the artificial. The form emerges from a 3D digital sculpture created from terrestrial reliefs (topographical maps, geological sites). This relief is then polished to give it the appearance of a translucent liquid. The transition to oil painting allows this movement to be frozen: its natural fluidity and slow drying (oxidation) offer the ideal precision for sculpting the effects of transparency. By mixing river sand into the coating of his canvas, the artist creates a mineral base that obscures the weave and gives the painting a vibrant texture, similar to the finish of an analog photograph. This work transforms a silent scientific material into a vibrant portrait, where the transparency of the gel becomes a metaphor for the memory of water and the fragility of life.

Lécher les flaques (Licking Puddles) is part of the artist’s ongoing exploration into the materiality of the projected image and its intimate relationship with space and time. This work plays with multiplicity, meaning, and transformation. It consists of a strip of paper emerging from a vase of salt-saturated water, which comes to rest upon a mirror, evoking a ‘graphic puddle’. Onto these objects, a video projects the image of a puddle in which a tree is reflected — already distorted by the movement of water and wind. This disturbed image, reflected in the mirrored strip on the floor, amplifies the visual experience and initiates a constant dialogue between the image and the surface that receives it. As the days pass, the evaporation of the water, the fragility of the paper, and the salt deposits trace a temporality specific to the material itself, which the video and its reflections accompany by constantly renewing the visual narrative. Lécher les flaques thus becomes a living sculpture — a contemplative space where image and matter intermingle between fragile appearance and inevitable disappearance, inviting the viewer to perceive the poetry of time, change, and impermanence.