Clara Darrason, Paris

Julia Gault, Amandine Guruceaga

A landscape is struck by a heatwave or a fire. The space transforms into a diorama of a fractured territory: walls are split and turned upside down, evoking a parched, cracked earth. The architecture echoes the desiccated ground, suggesting both destruction and regeneration: like a forest fire that devours and fertilises the soil.

 

Julia Gault presents her in situ work Vague de Chaleur, whose earthenware spreads across the floor like a metaphorical melted and drained landscape. Its raw state conveys fragility and impermanence. Eight perforated copper tubes, C’est la manière dont ces vagues pénètrent dans l’immeuble, are distributed across the wall and floor. Each tube contains fragments of a text drawn from Emmanuelle Pagano’s novel Ligne et Fils (Trilogie des rives). Normally used to channel water, the tubes here remain empty, evoking circulation, absence, and the invisible movements of water within a drying territory.

 

In dialogue with this installation, Amandine Guruceaga’s sculptures Vulnerable Flowers Bouquet 3 and Proliferation descend from the ceiling and emerge from the floor. These hybrid forms reference the artist’s fascination with pyrophytic plants: species with the remarkable capacity to resist or even benefit from fire to reproduce. Her practice extends across the walls through works combining stretched fabrics dyed with burned copper and brass, where burning and oxidation become painterly gestures.

 

Guruceaga’s paintings meet Gault’s wall work Les eaux débordées, whose practice explores hydrological phenomena in the high plateaus of southern France. Gault interweaves diverse data into a single-layered cartography, bringing together underground and surface flows. Where water is most active, acid bites more deeply, echoing limestone erosion and transforming the map into a tactile landscape.

 

Together, Julia Gault & Amandine Guruceaga create an immersive environment where the transformation of matter mirrors an ecological tension, staging a terrain suspended between collapse and renewal.

https://www.claradarrason.com/