Curation by Dominique Moulon
from 22 to 31 may 2025
Opening on 22 May from 6pm to 9pm
> Press Release
Paul Duncombe’s artistic practice is of an exploratory nature. He enjoys the company of scientists, who grant him access to worlds not entirely our own.
In the Pacific Ocean, his work is shaped through underwater dives from which he brings back clues, allowing him to create, in his studio, the images and sounds he presents as installations or performances. One of his central concerns is living organisms and their transformations in this age of the Anthropocene.
Thus, he observes life, notably at depths where diminishing light can no longer activate color. Unless, when it comes to coral reefs, this shift to black and white is due to climate change, the causes of which we know. Sometimes forced to delegate his observations to those who practice technical diving, he equips them with cameras and accompanies them via an underwater drone. With the data collected, he represents these strange territories where animals, without humans, would continue to evolve in symbiosis with plants and minerals. By using techniques such as photogrammetry, he can move his virtual cameras more fluidly within landscapes that are otherwise relatively transparent.
With access to an electron microscope, he continues his investigations at the scale of the microorganisms inhabiting corals to discover their structures. The result evokes meticulous, not to say obsessive, drawing practices. By exposing samples to infrared light, he reveals their bioluminescence, which, in the darkness of the depths, serves as a vector for communication among living beings.
With Paul Duncombe, the exhibition space takes on the appearance of a laboratory where the aesthetic experience revolves around meticulous observation. The artist designs his own display devices, allowing him in particular to classify aquatic organisms of the most diverse forms-mollusks and other crustaceans that never cross our paths, yet still suffer the consequences of our very existence. When he focuses on a fish larva, it is to scrutinize its pulsations which, at the tiny scale of its size, reveal the extreme fragility of a global ecosystem. And when all that remains of these living beings are external skeletons or shells, he uses radioactive elements to test their levels of protection, should the worst occur.
For the work that Paul Duncombe weaves through his experiences, from the natural environment to the exhibition laboratory, aims, beyond the aesthetic pleasure it provides, to awaken our consciousness.
