Artists

Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil

Press release

The exhibition features new works from Auguste-Dormeuil’s series Hope it was worth it (2020-) in which the artist works with historic Aubusson tapestries from the 16th to 18th centuries. After covering a certain part of the tapestry with India ink, the artist then overlays it with a map of the stars from the exact date of a historic event that coincides with the time of the tapestry’s creation. New works in the exhibition incorporate the skies at the time of the last view of Halley’s comet during its passage over Lisbon on June 22nd, 1759; the last great eruption of the volcano in Mount Fuji in 1707; or the sky over London on June 29 1613 when a fire broke out in the Globe theater during the performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. The tranquil scenes rendered in thread are suddenly interwoven with echoes of the great movements of history. 

The series continues the artist’s ongoing poetic engagement with our intertwine with the cosmos, the ephemerality of our eons and a constant play of scale, tragedy, drama, and the quiet observation of the stars above. A new subset of the series are smaller gold tapestries that evoke icons. Once again layering the stars, history and historic weaving, the scale and tonality of these works crystallize their potency.

A Golden Work (2025-), meanwhile, is a new series in which the artist intervenes on historic copies of the newspaper Le Petit Parisien. Published in the 19th century, it was the last newspaper that used drawings, before photography entered the media landscape. The faits divers, news briefs, thus were illustrated by people who had never witnessed the stories : a way of making fantastical, and imaginary, true moments from people’s lives and continuing the artist’s exploration of the slippery relationship between the imaginary and the real. While the tapestries work with additions — the artist layering in the maps of the stars — A Golden Work utilizes reduction and absence. Painting over parts of the newspaper in gold, the artist isolates parts of the image, frustrating the viewer with this decontextualization and playing with the metamorphosis of meaning.

A table is present in the exhibition where the artist displays references that underlie his research-based practice: books, illustrations, other photographs, deepening our understanding of the layers hidden within these works.  

 Curator | Julien Frydman