The works of Thomas Couderc are full of vitality, they overflow with energy which the form and the format they take up struggles to contain.

Flirting with the trivial, his propositions most often show themselves as growing, expanding, in movement, in their very form or nature. The unfinished, the exhausted or the virtual failure are never far off, beyond the frantic rhythm, overweening pride, the symbolic and/or real energy that they develop or summon. But neither the  miraculous nor the poetic, spring out from this very imbalance between the means and the energies employed and the final form are the result sought. For as much as it is that these clearly appear, they are far from being easily accomplished.

Thus it is not by chance that the mascot sculpture which accompanied the "Pilote 00" installation he has just finished creating at the Ateliers Vortex in Dijon, was a bear, one that had just been re-christened Timothy in homage to Timothy Treadwell, the American ecologist, a bear fanatic to whose tragic destiny Werner Herzog devoted his film Grizzly Man. Unfinished, bearer of a growth that in itself questions its completion and/or its finality, somewhat ironically the sculpture was made up of boxes of Frosties and other cereals for growing children, vectorized in some parts, re-customized in others.

All the cubic metres of the installation itself occupied the entire area of the exhibition space as so would a shapeless, invasive and enigmatic matrix. It was made up of an accumulation of discarded objects used in everyday life, collected from all the waste collection sites across the town, assembled end to end, and deliberately repainted white in a hasty and approximate manner, so as to hinder, as a skeletal and labyrinthine armour would,  the movement of visitors within the exhibition space.

One specific aspect of the preoccupations of Thomas Couderc is expressed in "Lépopée" (The epic) a performative protocol developed in collaboration with Teoman Gurgan. Articulating itself in a manner similar to a story, "Lépopée" takes form as performative installations which often evoke the notion of travelling and leisure activities, yet which, every time they are unrolled, require an incredible amount of energy and work considering the final result achieved or sought.

In La mine de vers de terre (The mine of earthworms) created for Mulhouse 2012, it was a question of convincing a company to move 100 cubic metres, i.e. 32tons of compost, into the exhibition space, in order to be able to dig a three metre-long tunnel, during the exhibition, to collect the earthworms it contained which, symbolically, afterwards, were needed to go fishing with.

In Les Vacances d'Automne (The Autumn Holidays), shown during Riam 09, it is a strawberry tree that two accomplices decide to uproot and take on holiday in a Renault 4L and to park it, while the exhibition is running, in Marseilles. This exploit, beyond the parable of its uprooting and the sometimes difficult but necessary creation of new roots, resided in keeping it alive by using hydroponics. In Dijon, "Lépopée" culminated in the allegorical exploit of walking on sea water in order to fish for corn-on-the-cob to be served at a barbecue of the festivity organized to celebrate the exploit.

The humour in Couderc's videos seems at first to be rather disturbing. Often one runs to them, sometimes only to loose one's breath. More often than not they show images of dynamic sequences, acceleration, fleeing, escaping, headlong rushes, of fights or chases, as in Le Vallon (The valley) where the implicit view of the artist, the invisible lens of the camera is chased in an unlikely hunt with hounds or, instead, on foot, dragged and screamed at by a band of onlookers whose intentions are difficult to establish.

The suspension of meaning and context, of the destination and even the finality of all this energy which expresses itself and develops before our very eyes reminds us of metaphysical questioning of such a strangeness which finally is quite apparent.

In LOVE PROGRESS S01E03, the video that we are showing here, the dialectic tension swinging from the elements of disco and the obviously makeshift structure, put together as a form of a boxing ring, initially seems to be a mysterious and suspensory décor.

But as always with Couderc the eye is as one with the camera and plunges, admittedly, into a stylized, archetypal and deliberately forced décor, dramatized yet more by the sound track produced by Simon Kozak, without however that this assumed trickery neither demystifies nor defuses the charged atmosphere of the existential thriller.

By accentuating them, Couderc plays on the perceptive and narrative chiasmus, the disproportions and discrepancies in scale and contexts, to reach a climax through the progressive and surprising eruption of these creatures that we all hold within us – earthworms. A red herring, quirky farce or bitter-sweet parody of existence, we will leave you to judge. The way of treating demonstration through sculpture, both absorbing, expansive and slightly unbalancing, will hold the viewer's attention long enough for him to form his own opinion. 

Text by Emmanuel Lambion

Translation by Caroline Newman