Artists

Franck Scurti

Press release

In Grids of Life, he turns his attention to one of modernity’s most persistent yet most unassuming symbols: the grid. It calls to mind modern urbanism and industrial architecture alike, digital infrastructures and the invisible systems that govern our daily lives. The grid is not a neutral geometric form; it operates as a device of control, separation and rationalisation. One might read it as a material incarnation of industrial capitalist logic; its will to organise, rationalise and extract. Yet the grids Scurti works with are never pristine. They already carry a material history, a fatigue, a vulnerability. He presents them in their degraded state, although he has repainted some, insisting that their wear is not incidental but essential. What interests him is precisely this alteration: the moment when a structure ceases to embody perfect order and becomes instead a body marked by time, by use and by the tensions it has endured. The grid as a physical witness to a system that produced it, then discarded it. In an act of reappropriation, he intervenes in the gaps and interstices with plasticine — a malleable, organic, childlike material — which he then paints in a subjective palette of his own choosing. Where the grid reaches toward abstraction and normalisation, the material reintroduces accident, manipulation and life. A gesture that does not destroy the grid, but attempts to inhabit it differently. The grid remains, but it is no longer sovereign. The Black Boxes laid on the floor extend this reflection through humble objects: chocolate bar wrappers, permanently sealed and rendered inaccessible beneath a coat of black asphalt, punctuate the space and enter into a dynamic tension with the grids. The packaging ceases to be a simple wrapper; it becomes a block, a relic, an opaque cell. What once belonged to the swift circulation of desire is here immobilised, absorbed into a black surface that refuses both commercial seduction and transparency. By taking care to leave the brand visible, Scurti also opens a line of thought toward the conquest of the planet Mars. Space exploration is now dominated by private actors, raising urgent questions about exploitation and property rights. The term astrocapitalism has emerged to describe the extreme extension of market logic — the condition in which every resource, air, water, living space, acquires a commercial value. The principles of extraction, rationalisation and possession are precisely those that the advocates of this extraterrestrial colonial expansion seek to set in place. Finally, with Memory Map, Scurti attempts to reconstruct the world without any instrument of verification, drawing solely from memory alone. The planisphere he draws makes no claim to geographical accuracy; it reveals instead the very instability of all mental representation. Territories become floating, approximate, at times contradictory. Colours occupy the surface as zones of memory rather than fixed political borders. These colours, in a kind of anticipation of being distributed across the planisphere, correspond perfectly to the grids and their rectangles of painted plasticine. All three bodies of work speak, in the end, to the same contemporary condition: a world gridded, packaged, mapped and administered, yet one that has grown increasingly difficult to inhabit mentally and physically. Between the worn grids, the sealed surfaces of the Black Boxes and the fragile cartography of Memory Map, the exhibition seeks to reopen spaces of sensation within the very structures that claim to organise our lives.