'Uhhh.. ok!' by Aurélien Potier at Belsunce Projects, Marseille

Aurélien Potier’s practice originally comes from figurative painting, photorealistic painting on his own saying. An interior, slow and meditative process, from which Aurélien drives apart in his recent work, going towards more immediacy. 

Aurélien’s work lies on scattered temporalities: nervous drawings, directly drawn on canvas or paper that breaks the order of his typed texts. Those are sticked up all over the walls. He tirelessly steps in those prints, writing the same words, the same sentences, over and over. 
The apparent speed of execution of these recent works sets in contrast with a sensual and haptic video - another door to the practice. The artist works in collaboration with the sound work of Hugo Mir-Valette, on this movie and on two-persons performances. 

The texts are an important part to understand the work of Aurélien Potier. He never ceases to shape them, using the words that obsess him - the words that questions himself as the matter. He writes on what surrounds him, accumulates all emotions, desire, vulnerability, online conversations, alternating languages between French and English. 

His gaze shifts direction, he is here. He doesn’t hide. His tricks are as simple as that. The tricks coming from a simple marker pen, a simple pastel. His tricks reveal his daily life, with matters easy to transport. He transports them with him. 
 He looks at you in the eyes when he speaks, he sometimes puts his head into his notebook to read the words he wrote yesterday, last year or this afternoon. We listen to those raw words, triggering us to feel the boundaries of our envelopes. Resonating with certain political climate: "we are going to suffocate, as usual" - as read in the stream of consciousness he offers. All the complexity of the artist resonates in this exhibition. The text, overwhelming, is multiplied all through the space. The drawings, seemingly scribbled, reveal a skillful hand as his secret practice of copying Michelangelo’s sketches undertones. 

One perceives his taking. He manipulates, tricks and softly caresses his fragility and his anxieties in order to ask simple questions. He invites us inside his reflexions and his observation on the ways to exist in a world that keeps on rejecting.