Side Gallery
Side Gallery
WishlistFollow
Follow
INFINITO VIVIENTE BY ELISSA LACOSTE
INFINITO VIVIENTE
SIDE GALLERY
BARCELONA
9TH NOV 2022 - 14TH FEB 2023
Side Gallery’s first solo exhibition with the French designer Elissa Lacoste, Infinito Viviente took its title from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and alludes to the vibrant atmosphere of a speculative and immersive underwater landscape that characterised Elissa’s collection.
From within her countryside atelier in Burgundy, Elissa Lacoste encrypts her objects with her underlying impulses and thirst for the wild. She often pauses by natural sites she sees as a theater of materials that point to the potentiality of being otherly. A vital force is strongly present in her work as she continues blending unexpected materials; an uncanny symbiosis between manmade and natural ones. In a seemingly alchemical process, these two pollinate to turn the unspectacular into vibrantly enticing pieces.
Over the past five years, Lacoste has been honing her own set of skills and techniques with the unraveling of an ever-growing material library which has resulted in a signature artisanal craft. Her sculptural practice and making of objects is an ongoing conversation with improvisational assemblages of unruly potential, all while embracing her creative force by taking matters into her own hand, and making the process and the final outcome as experiential as experimental.
This new body of over 21 functional sculptures for her first solo show unfolds like an expanding never before seen seascape of floating, hovering and grounded elements in an inviting game of pareidolia.
By defamiliarizing the familiar and familiarizing the unfamiliar, she provokes a cognitive dissonance within the audience, such as with her stone-like silicone pieces encoded and fossilized with traces of earthly materials and powders, the elegant pierre de Bourgogne for this series she has collected and sifted herself. Her ‘Shagreen’ set of floating tables embody forms of living species appearing as natural curiosities that lure you in; and upon a closer look, their surface reveals the ungraspable nature of their texture that retains the familiarity of cells under a microscope and yet remain a wonder, ultimately conveying the results of a complex process of transformation. The collection of floor and table lamps emulate diagenetic processes of a wide range of sedimentary rocks in their different colorful and shimmering textures and appearances as a result of relentless layering and sanding of improbable materials. These monolithic pieces merge into casted aluminum reef-like assemblages that seem to freeze a process of metamorphosis; a sudden open invitation into the making process; and are sofened by the unexpected touch of translucent silicone wild flowers, showcasing yet another quality she holds of mix and matching surprising elements.
The haptic ways of discovering these intricately unique pieces make for an overflow of experience that doesn’t stop at pure contemplation but is comprised of charged material moments. As such, her objects linger on the margins of the interior and invite us to reflect on our relationship to our physical environment be it anthropogenic or natural.
Lacoste’s work considers the gathering of materials and their assemblage and interplay as a celebratory act of defying prediction and conjuring mutating synthetic topographies and rebellious biomes within contemporary boundaries. Just as Jules Verne describes the sea, ‘you feel life stirring on all sides’, Elissa’s collection alludes to the diversity that was or could be, with materials flowing free from tyranny.
Elissa Lacoste (b. 1994, France) is an experimental designer who lives and works in Burgundy, France. She studied at Ecole Supérieure d’Art et Design Saint-Etienne and Latvian Art Academy in Riga. She obtained her MA at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018 in the Netherlands.
Hands-on and instinctive, her work stems from her quest for the wild, the inexplicable and the sensorial within contemporary boundaries. Unconventionally textured and vibrant, her sculptural pieces linger between the real and the surreal while maintaining a hint of functionality. In her work, she evokes an otherness to reflect upon our relationship to our physical environment, be it anthropogenic or natural.
Her organic forms often provoke a cognitive dissonance like her monolithic stone-like silicone pieces.
Fascinated by material abilities and not bounded to a specific material, she looks into various techniques but prefers to experiment intuitively, without resorting to traditional craft knowledge as a first step.
In this way she favors serendipity and encounters surprising results that she develops into her own techniques and methods of shaping matter and creating objects.