Palais de Tokyo is pleased to invite the duo of artists, Pia Rondé & Fabien Saleil, for an original exhibition, presented in an ancient, 12th-century chapel.

Inspired by the figure of Empedocles, who perished on the rim of Etna, the exhibition « Topophile des cendres » [Topophily of Ashes] stages different forms of fire, evoking just as much purification as annihilation, or the instincts of life and death as convoked by Gaston Bachelard in his Psychanalysis of Fire. Pia Rondé & Fabien Saleil are here continuing their work on the extension of the world of photography, towards a crossing with such techniques as drawing, engraving, sculpture and installation.

Their project at the Chapelle de la Madeleine, which is as physical as it is mental, can be travelled through like the intuitive environment of an upcoming narrative. The spatialization and fragmentation of images – charred forests, lava in fusion or mineral worlds – give rise to a “screaming landscape”, in the words of the artists. Work in a darkroom, hand-blown glass, or pencil-drawings are combined together, mingling the burning of images and the incandescence of matter.

The appearance – and disappearance – of images lies at the heart of the creation process of Pia Rondé & Fabien Saleil. Their work is based on the observation of nature, and its confrontation with human, or even cultural occupations. The artists effect symbolic extractions from the living world, and mouldings of reality, before associating them with a constructive, mathematical rigour.

This characterises not just their photographic assemblies, but also their drawings or installations, where the mineral, vegetable and animal coexist within a landscape where geometric and architectural cut-ups are loaded with an organic power.

Curator : Daria de Beauvais

Chapelle de la Madeleine
19, rue de la Madeleine – 13200 Arles