Vues de l’exposition personnelle .TECHNO à la galerie Eric Mouchet, Paris, 2017
Avec le soutien du CNAP.

Photo : © Rebecca Fanuele

Photo : © Rebecca Fanuele

Sans titre, 2017
Vernis acrylique, peinture acrylique, Jesmonite, bois, acier.
Œuvre unique.
96 x 54 x 30 cm
Photo : © Rebecca Fanuele

Surface informée #2, 2017 - 2016
Vernis, colorant, chrome, aluminium.
Œuvre unique.
171 x 76 x 80 cm.
Photo : © Robin Lopvet

Surface informée #3, 2017
Vernis, colorant, chrome, aluminium.
Œuvre unique.
Photo : © Robin Lopvet

Human experience, 2017
Série en cours.
Chaque objet : 33 x 33 cm.
Photo : © Robin Lopvet

Objets sombres, 2017
Objet sombre (Bleu Outremer)
Peinture acrylique, plâtre polyester, PMMA, aluminium.
Œuvre unique.
100 X 80 x 11 cm.
Photo : © Robin Lopvet

Objets sombres, 2017
Objet sombre (Jaune Citron), Objet sombre (Vert Wagon), Objet sombre (Rouge Vif), Objet sombre (Ombre Brûlée),
Objet sombre (Bleu Céruléen).
Peinture acrylique, plâtre polyester, PMMA, aluminium.
Œuvres uniques.
100 X 80 x 11 cm.
Photo : © Rebecca Fanuele

.TECHNO (English)

Although Samir Mougas is no stranger to electronic music and synthesized sound – dub, trance, house, new beat, techno – the title of the exhibition – .TECHNO – is more than just a reference to the musical genre.

The original techno emerged in Detroit in the middle of the 1980s in response to the plight of a city that within a generation went from a golden age of prosperity and abundance spurred by industrial and economic success to a state of deep crisis, scarred by poverty, deprivation, and urban segregation. Techno was both vigourous and melancholic, and zinging with pride too. In the words of Laurent Garnier: “this music is metal, glass, steel.1” And so they danced and they wept.

The exhibition’s title is a clear allusion to music that the artist appreciates and enthusiastically shares, and that during the 1990s marked some of the artists who influenced him, including Stéphane Dafflon and Carsten Nicolai. But above all it’s an analogy: Samir Mougas’s interest lies in “approaches to synthetic music that involve human interaction with a music software interface to create all kinds of new experiences.” He views his own work as a take on the history of technology and more broadly on our machine-driven, ever-changing modernity. Here, as with techno, the melancholy is rooted in a resolutely futuristic outlook.

The inhabitual punctuation contained in the title takes us from the realm of music into the additional arenas of internet and information technology: .TECHNO could almost be the perfect domain name for our entire era alongside the more common .com, .net, and .org, and the more recent .art. It’s like the extension of an as yet unknown IT file, a string of digital data of a new kind, existing in the limbo between 2D and 3D, a characteristic of the sculptures presented in the exhibition. All of them were created by bringing together collections of digital forms and 3D draughting and modelling software (SculptMaster 3D and Blender) and then applying more traditional sculpture processes (moulding, modelling, assembly, chroming, painting).

How to overcome the 2D constraints of the screen: such is the fundamental question behind innumerable artistic practices today, in particular the entire galaxy of what comes under the umbrella term “post-internet”, which describes the creative work of a whole generation of artists who are “_active on social networks, irreversibly dependent on search engines, and who use a MacBook as their studio and have a smartphone at all times._2”

The work of Samir Mougas however stands apart from the practices described above, rooted as they are in the imagery of the internet: Samir delves into these new technological realms more as a sculptor than as an iconographer.

The series entitled Surfaces Informées was produced over a number of stages, with the prototypes made as follows: a sketch was produced using SculptMaster 3D, the form was then exported to Blender and refined, full scale drawings were produced, a prototype was sculpted in polystyrene, the structure was made rigid, and texture was added using plaster. Once two studies were completed, production of the sculptures was outsourced to three different trades: an industrial foundry (sand-casting in aluminium), a locksmith (to create the bases), and car body painting (to chrome the surfaces of the sculptures).

Painstaking and elaborate as this entire process may seem, it tells us at least two things.
Firstly that precise organisation of production processes is essential when involving outside professions in that it allows for a more refined and polished finish than an artist using artisanal methods in the studio would be able to achieve (this has been a key issue for sculptors at least since the minimal art era).

Secondly, that creating physical versions of forms generated using computers is by definition a gradual process: these are truly hybrid structures, and all the more so given their abstract nature. The brilliance of chrome reflects everything in its vicinity, giving the sculptures a synthetic quality that takes us back to their IT origins, slightly attenuating their physical presence.

Singularité (2013) played with the same ambivalence, wherein the shining red surface of the sphere in the image recalled a classical 3D modelling exercise (realistic treatment of surface reflectivity); it also evoked Amiga’s famous Boing Ball, a mythical form in the history of information technologies invented in 1984 as a way for Amiga to showcase the animation capabilities of its computers.

Objets Sombres plays on the same ambivalence between physical presence and cerebral existence. This series takes the form of airbrush-painted bas-reliefs on a black plexiglass background that calls to mind the screens of web-connected objects. Here again we see images seeking to burst out of the two dimensional realm into the three dimensional world.

Samir Mougas’s work is rooted in the cultural landscape of the 1980s: techno, cyberpunk litterature, and the whole gamut of synthetic culture that permeated music, design, science fiction and technology. In France, the entire era was symbolised by the Minitel. The 1980s saw the development of networks, 3D animation and digital music, and the last great peak of futurism global culture has known. The 1980s also saw the birth of the key conundrum in information technology discourse: the relationship between the real and the virtual. Rather than being hermetically sealed off from each other, the two exist in a range of modes that vary between the more mental and the more physical; sculpture allows this balance to be explored.

Samir Mougas’s works contain remnants of biological ancestrality (the trilobites and other fossils that come to mind in connection with moulding, as per Allan McCollum’s The Dog From Pompei and Natural Copies From the Coal Mines of Central Utah series, for example) alongside flashy reminders of modernity (sneakers, screens, connected objects), a sign maybe that we stand on the cusp of a new peak of futurism wherein accelerating time will bring materials and information finally to commingle freely.

Jill Gasparina

1 Laurent Garnier & David Brun-Lambert, Électrochoc, Flammarion, Paris, 2003, p. 134.
2 Benoit Lamy de la Chapelle, “De l’art ‘post-Internet’”, Zérodeux, published online: http://www.zerodeux.fr/essais/de-lart-post-internet/