Altered States

Berger&Berger, 2011
Rosacscape, Paris
curator : Alexandra Baudelot

Altered States stages “speculative objects”; objects and sculptures which are both real and fictional. Objects of organic or mineral origin which do not fulfill a function but produce their own physical constraints. It is a “real” exhibition (with a wooden floor, struts, a map, images...) which produces an intensified realism more than a deliberate fiction. These pieces to not constitute a succession of disparate arrangements but a set of entities making up a singular domestic space.

Ghost Towns
Berger&Berger, 2009
2 inkjet prints on paper. 115 x 76 cm
Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) Collection

Notus Loci
Berger&Berger, 2011
Plaster, 2 times 58 x 67 x 10 cm. Exclusive piece.
Notus Loci was made in the CRAFT (Centre de recherche sur les arts du feu et de la terre) workshops in Limoges.
Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris collection

Astre Blanc
Berger&Berger, 2011
Porcelain, metal. Diameter: 25 cm.
Edition of 5+1AP.
Astre Blanc was made in the CRAFT (Centre de recherche sur les arts du feu et de la terre) workshops in Limoges.
Private collection.
Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) collection.

Parquet Vassivière
Berger&Berger, 2011
Dust of immersed tree stumps, epoxy resin, magnets, 170 x 390 cm.
Unique piece.

Sans titre (André Le Nôtre)
Laurent P. Berger, 2011
Series of 5 photographs, 5 x 35 x 35 cm. Printed on Baryte paper.

Sans titre series
Laurent P. Berger, 2011
Pencil drawing on Bristol Superfine paper, 51 x 51 cm.
Private collection

Vanishing Point (RAL P2242)
Laurent P. Berger, 2011
Steel tubes, epoxy paint, magnets, dimensions variable.

Jour électrique
Berger&Berger, 2011
fluorescent tubes, metal, dominos, Dimensions variable.

Ghost Towns is a map. The piece brings about the emergence, both geographically and in the form of narratives, of the vanished cities that recall the history of ancient and recent civilizations. A map without function or use, a non-exhaustive accumulation of more than a thousand cities identified by individuals or groups. What becomes legible, then, is a geography of ancient, modern, and contemporary mythologies.

Notus Loci is a piece of architecture without scale. The object’s dimensions are determined by the maximal dimensions for the encasing necessary for it to be realized. This prints that formalize the architectural intervention realized in the Vassivière Château, the extension of the Centre international d’art et du paysage (International Center for Art and Landscape) on Vassivière island: a draft of wind.

Astre Blanc
Astre Blanc is a globe that, unlike a map of the world, does not represent two separate hemispheres, but a continuous surface with no hierarchy or points of reference. This sculpted object constitutes the establishment of a morphology of the terrestrial globe and its surface according to the recent geodesic simulations of the Earth. Astre Blanc is accompanied by the
text Le Globe blanc ou les évidences trompeuses (The White Globe or the Misleading Pieces of Evidence) by Bertrand Westphal.

Parquet Vassivière
Parquet Vassivière is a hardwood floor realized using the trunks that came from the territory of the Millevaches plateau. Submerged since 1950 in the Vassivière Lake, created at the same time as the EDF dam, these trunks are extracted from their “artificial” milieu. Reduced to dust, they are then transformed into a manufactured surface. Parquet Vassivière is the retroactive and imaginary creation of the hardwood floor of the castle with the same name that, constructed
at the crest of the valley, was saved from the flooding of the lake.

Sans titre (André Le Nôtre) is a series of photographic prints of a single image taken in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, at the spot that affords the main vista from the Royal Alley to the Latona fountain, towards the Grand Canal. The image is constructed by reversing the left and right and the top and bottom, along the vanishing point axis. Each print is altered by removing
the vanishing point, the limit point of disappearance.

Sans titre series
A minimal drawing, the series constitutes the superposition of matter from pencil lead over the surface of the paper, presenting an elementary form: a surface in the midst of appearing.

Vanishing Point (RAL P2242)
A series of steel columns, Vanishing Point (RAL P2242) reconfigures domestic space into an interior landscape. These autonomous columns, which serve no function, hold their sole physical entity in balance. With form and function liberated from one another, it is the constraints and qualities of the objects that are put on display. Objects that initiate a free interpretation of their uses. The black epoxy paint (RAL P2242) covering them preserves the integrity of these pieces and acts as a seal hermetic to the climate within the exhibition space.

Jour électrique
Jour électrique effects a transfer of the zenithal electric light of the white cube onto the apartment windows. By superimposing itself onto the astronomical cycle of daylight, this apparatus literally produces supernatural lighting.