Over the top

Surveying the city, the contours of objects, the spirals of language and sometimes those of obsession, the works of Jonathan Martin, Rosa Moreno and Clémence de La Tour du Pin negotiate with what conditions perception.

Everyone detects and subverts stratagems that direct our gaze, channel desire and existence – to break or disrupt the automaton. “Over the top, undercover” connects to these tensions in the field of the sensible, to its manipulations, its elastic nature.

The exhibition reveals the logic of make-up in all things, where what is enhanced also depends on what one seeks to blur. The artists thus look at what staging camouflages, what it expresses in code – the mechanisms of the unconscious, of debt, of delirium.

Jonathan Martin’s work could be said to act through disturbances, contrary excitations, halfway between euphoria and stasis. The icy vocabulary of media, communication, the music industry or entertainment is alternately intensified or interrupted.

Through films, sound pieces, and editions, Jonathan Martin restructures the point of view in a complicit relationship with objects, an implosive relationship with language. Everything is a bit electric, sometimes on edge: after or on the verge of climax.

Movements of extension and limit also run through the works of Clémence de La Tour du Pin.

By means of anamorphoses and stratifications, the artist composes assemblages where matter condenses, sometimes fractures; where elements accumulate into textures, tear into patterns, and communicate as if by magnetic affections.

Clémence de La Tour du Pin works, among other things, with specific historical archives, which serve as anchor points for various research: images of subatomic particles or industrial oil complexes, which she sometimes brings into dialogue with personal photographs, fragments of video clips or pop icons – all entry points for understanding how perception constitutes a field of forces.

The way power represents itself, how domination is structured and sometimes even