David Douard is without a doubt one of the most unsettling revelations in recent years. His work savagely leaps into the most contradictory of references—poetry, history of science, technology, animism, counterculture, etc.—and he gives them expression through combinations of video, sculpture, collage, sound, and past masterpieces grafted onto interactive installations in order to create allegorical tales that reflect the infectious relationships that manifest between worlds that hoped themselves impermeable to one another. Transforming the exhibition into a rumor, David Douard proposes to slip into the «diseases of the real» for his first major solo exhibition. Composed of viral works generated by a text matrix, the exhibition explores the slow shifts and fractures that haunt us and become hybrid sculptures, mutating scripts, and uncontrollable images.

David Douard (b. 1983, lives and works in Paris) draws inspiration from the processes of transformation and development at work in our world, making plants, wit, saliva, images, technology or language into tools to reveal the principles of transmission. Organic, porous and complex, his work deploys itself in bounds and imitates the dynamics of a proliferating virus, insinuating itself into the “ills of reality” and the contamination of the world, and infiltrating the mysteries and anomalies of our programming.

David Douard unfurls his exhibition “Mo’Swallow” like a fable that he might unravel between the feeding breast and the dumbfounded eye as a witness to the absurd mutations of the world. He uses for example the leitmotiv of rumor, that mysterious mental contagion resembling
an irrational spasm without substance, reason, intention or even origin. This rumor is born, develops, is transmitted, disappears, transforms itself and bursts forth anew, enhanced by the prowess of language and the fertile ground of contemporary mythologies. As a sign of the living and the movement of imaginaries, it is close
to a primitive and instinctive mode of thinking
from which the exhibition draws substance. As a collective work, it functions as a connector between consciousnesses, a progressive psychic contamination. Bewitchment of the world and collective ventriloquism: this mental contagion is as much a magical response as a necessary remedy to master the unknown. “Mo’Swallow” draws its forms from this jubilation of the absurd
akin to a waking dream, recreating through mutations a scenario in which the human, the poetic, language and the machine are able to lay bare the troubling activities of the world.

Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel