10 April 2024 The French visual artist exhibits her paleoclimatic projects in Clermont-Ferrand, plunging nature into prehistoric times with her decoys and tricks.
Untitled (Mountain II), 2021. (Noémie Goudal. Frac Auvergne. Adagp 2024)
A panorama of slumbering volcanoes and green shields, soft as caresses. Endless forests, fresh air and two curved skylines, Clermont-Ferrand, whose cathedral's black spires, so tall you can't see them, tear the sky apart. At the foot of Notre-Dame-de-L'Assomption, a Gothic behemoth of pacem stone, nestles the Franc Auvergne - pending a move to the old Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the appointment of a new director. What better environment for Noémie Goudal? Inhale Exhale is the title of the exhibition by the French visual artist, who has been making a name for herself since her double performance at the Rencontres d'Arles and the Festival d'Avignon in 2022. Inhale Exhale is also the title of one of her flashing neon works, which encourages viewers to pay attention to their breathing. Fill your lungs, exhale slowly... It takes a lot of breath to follow the artist into the limbo of paleoclimate.
"Infinite." Because this is precisely where she wants to take us, back in time, millions of years, to those distant eras when, no doubt, the volcanoes of Auvergne were still spewing magma. Paris-based Noémie Goudal, born in 1984, is interested in the climates and geological phenomena of prehistoric times, long before the appearance of man. And she does it with the means at hand: the nature in front of her eyes, ideas, but also paper, scissors, scotch tape, pliers, sheets of Rhodoid and a camera. If you allow yourself to be contemplative, if you immerse yourself in her installations, videos or photos, it's a space-time journey that she offers us. Breathe out.
"There's the Earth's long time - deep time - which moves very slowly and where everything is a movement. We humans move very fast, living in seconds and minutes. Today, these two temporalities are coming together, and the Earth is beginning to move at man's pace. So it's good to think of the Earth in a slow, large-scale temporality, as an immense, infinite entity. The planet is 4 billion years old, so what are we, the human race, compared to that?"asks the artist in front of “Démantèlment”, a series of photos of the same cliff which gradually dissolves on a hundred A4 sheets. A sort of decomposed stop motion, flattened, simply nailed to the walls, “Démantèlment” assembles two pieces of cliff: the real one, in the background, and the fake one, printed on water-soluble paper. The latter gradually disappears in front of the lens, as if the mountain behind was being eaten away by the erosion of time.
A lover of special effects, Noémie Goudal uses tricks and tricks, a bit tinkered with. She seeks to make the imperceptible perceptible, to stretch out the decisive moment. We could even say that she unfolds time, with grace. "What I love about the photo is that it looks flat but inside, there are lots of layers. All these strata contain different temporalities."An illusionist, she adds layers to the layers. On her Instagram and her website, she sets up her devices and the making-ofs. For her “Tropique” series, for example, she plants lush plant settings in front of her lens, outdoors, in a wood on the edge of Paris. Only a tiny waterfall from the real environment appears in the background.
"In the Bois de Vincennes, there was already a jungle. The Paris basin was a sea. One day, part of the rocks of our territory were at the level of the Equator . The Earth is in constant motion." For "Origins'" a recent series, she placed a large image of bushy plants on the wall of her studio, then she placed a translucent sheet between her lens and the image: the misty forest suddenly looked like it was in a vivarium, like a species to defend. It also looks like an oil painting, half realistic, half fantastic. In the superb Untitled (Mountain I), she places two pieces of gray cardboard in front of a snowy landscape, like a stratigraphic section, as if the mountain were placed on a concrete base.
Squalls. Same idea with White Pulse, a small black and white print of immense mountains which form folds. In the middle of the undulations of cut-out paper, for the first time, we see two trains and a tunnel lost in the immensity of the rock. “Could there be a form of energy within the landscape itself that would create a curvature, curves, that we cannot see with the naked eye?”asks the artist, Noémie Goudal sometimes has the impression of slipping into the cracks of the landscape to reveal its magic. Explorer of the earth's crust, she probes, in her own way, general relativity: "All my work focuses on the relationships between landscape and time." Generous, she brings her fantasy to life for the visitor at the end of the exhibition: we enter an immense photograph printed on strips of paper. The image depicts palm trees in a storm. It’s a tribute to Hector, a palm tree from Saint-Barthélemy who became a social media star because he withstood the gusts of a hurricane.
Nominated for the Marcel-Duchamp prize, Noémie Goudal is preparing three films for her exhibition in Beaubourg in September. "It's a crazy opportunity but it's also a lot, a lot of stress.'" At the moment, it's another type of "tornado" - she says it - which has taken over the artist's studio.
