Thomas Buswell was born in Switzerland in 1998, and lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in 2024.
His work, which he describes as ‘something to live’, suggests tensions between nature and modern comfort, attraction and repulsion. Through simple movements and an open-minded approach towards various techniques, Thomas Buswell adopts a state of receptiveness toward drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and sound. Porous relationships are established, and the organic dimension of these installations draws us into a vast ecosystem. In the same logic, the involvement of the spectators’ bodies extends the movement initiated, in an impulse reminiscent of what led the first humans to paint in caves.
The exhibition’s title, Roseau social, is loosely inspired by Pascal, who wrote in Les Pensées : ‘Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this’.
Roseau social is also a play on words that evokes the duality between earthly things and the virtual, between Pascal’s “thinking reed” and the social networks that infuse our lives. It also evokes the collective dimension of Thomas Buswell’s work, through the invitation extended to visitors, especially with the vitrine or when traversing the sticky rolls in the exhibition space.
Thomas Buswell’s installation features a fountain made of several speakers covered with mops, immersed in a basin filled with water, extended by outgrowths that spread across the ground like mutant mushrooms. Made ineffective, the voiceless megaphones invite us to contemplate them in a form of stillness, like the fountain of a village square. The flowing water mingles with long streams of pink, yellow, green and blue paint, raising the idea of potential contamination. Paradoxically, the flow of this green-tinted water seems to commemorate a collective outcry to a standstill, an impotent revolt constrained by this closed-circuit circulation.
The walls of the vitrine, covered by clay, are oozing. In contrast to the usual clinical use of the vitrine, here, space is given over to the handling of viscous, flowing, slippery dirt. The glass receives the instability of our gestures, of our traces, as fragile as they are assertive. In the movement of successive gestures, this delightful smearing that connects us to childhood experiments materialises the collective repression of an original bond with the earth.
Between the water that beads on the windows and that which flows in the fountain, we are literally immersed in a humidity that directly evokes our relationship with our natural environment. It is to this fragile vision of Man described by Pascal, this “thinking reed” that would bend at the touch of a single drop of water, as well as to the infinity of nature and the vastness of the universe, that Thomas Buswell undoubtedly wishes to awaken us. Climate disruptions seem to regularly remind us that Nature, which knows nothing, affects everything that Man produces and engenders.
It is therefore significant that Thomas Buswell incorporates into his installation a painting that represents the collective existence of animals by drawing on the codes of Poya, the vernacular and naive paintings depicting the ascent of herds to mountain pastures. Typically displayed at the gables of Swiss chalets, these paintings provide an inventory of the herd and highlight the prosperity of shepherds. This reference to popular painting humorously plays with the logistical and accounting dependency that we maintain as humans on animals.
Rendez-vous
Opening
Wednesday 06.11.24, 6-9pm
Artist-curator visit
Wednesday 04.12.24, 7.30pm
with Thomas Buswell and Maëlle Dault