Artists

Guillaume Dénervaud

Press release

Holistic Equations

Every year, when the light tilts toward orange and the air turns dry,
I feel the call. It is not a sound but a pulse — steady, deep — that pushes me into the sky.

Tiny crystals have gathered on my shell during the flight,
glinting between the dark patches and the metallic sheen of my wings.

I push my way through the dry, blade-sharp reeds that rustle like paper,
moving toward the entrance of the abandoned manufactory.

Perched for a moment on the old watchtower, I scan the deserted horizon in every direction.
As far as I can see, metal structures disintegrate into bark-like fragments,
as if steel were slowly turning back into soil.

At my feet, the building’s skeleton cracks the concrete and weeps oxides in shades of red and ochre.
Further on, deep retention basins surround a dozen spherical tanks.
A network of pipelines ties them to the extinguished burners of the plant to the west.

At last, I find the opening: a small gap in a ventilation pipe leading to the heart.
There, we gather, pressed close, and sink into the long lethargy of diapause.

Our still bodies seem to vanish into the darkness, yet the air holds our imprint:
invisible threads of pheromones slide along the walls, seep into the pores of the metal.

GD
Guillaume Dénervaud renders dense forests of organic and engineered forms using stencils and templates he has collected over the years. These templates include traditional architectural French curves and various ellipses, as well as branded stencils used by real estate agents and furniture designers to sketch diverse industrial elements: the curve of a wall, the shape of bathroom fixtures, plumbing, electrical wiring, etc. As CAD has made these tools mostly obsolete for commercial use, Dénervaud redeploys them to create various visions of the future built on the remnants of today’s industrialized society. 

These new anticipatory scenarios of dystopian scapes seem more like disrupted habitats than deliberate plans, with mutant flora, overgrown invasive species, rusting motor parts collecting silt in lakebeds, and living tissue merging with electronic circuitry. Flowing shapes reminiscent of parasitic plants or cancerous cells proliferate. Dénervaud infuses the systems with life by using ink and oil paint made from plants, algae, and minerals: the colors don’t only represent nature, they are derived from nature itself, crushed and dissolved and stirred.