22.10.2021 - 19.12.2021

Opening 22.10.2021 at 7 pm

Curator: Diana Baldon

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Skin Carpet is the first solo exhibition in France by Danish artist FOS (Thomas Poulsen; b. 1971, lives and works in Copenhagen and Venice). His artistic practice moves across genres, encompassing sculpture, installation, architectural, design and music. Since the beginning of the 2000s, his works have been exploring how the aesthetic language of objects and spaces can define us as social beings.
The exhibition title is an invented word that encodes a dual meaning referring to a double space. On the one hand, it references the haptic experience of human touch on dissonant but smooth surfaces, such as skins and carpets. On the other, it relates to materials whose predominant task is to wrap and frame something else.

The exhibition is staged as a large-scale environment shaped by 240-meter long hand-coloured canvas that sketches out an outsized pair of human lungs. By inhaling and exhaling, the biological process of this organ mechanically moves air through the body while metabolizing oxygen. In FOS ́ sculptural setting, this organic chamber is scaled up to become a soft architectural interior where penetrable barriers enclose our bodies as well as the volume of air that circulates in and out of them.

Few sculptural objects are sparsely arranged within the organ-shaped stage. Among these, a glass tube sculpture expels vapour like a connecting artery. The biomorphic shapes of the gentle fog manifest through the scrutinizing eye of a thermic camera, whose very image is projected on a large screen at the entrance.
Like a radar, the thermographic picture draws continually sinuous forms of glowing light that reveal the otherwise undetectable movements of hot air and substance. While in constant exhalation, the steam morphs into the surrounding environment to flow and transform into new life cycles. Heat is the artistic material, invisible matter dissolving into the viewer ́s body, pervading it front and back in a space fashioned as that body part upon which rests on the human breath.

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