Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

The Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection is embracing the colours of the summer season with clinamen, an aquatic and musical installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. This immersive project transforms the Rotunda into contemplative space in which a basin 18 meters in diameter filled with water reflects the sky seen through the museum’s dome. White ceramic bowls float across this blue surface, generating melodious, enchanting sounds as a light current pushes them along. These acoustic vibrations, free of any intervention by a performer, constitute the very heart of the piece, a veritable symphony of the moment that evolves with a flow of invisible waves.

This work forms part of a tradition in which sound becomes a living material freed of the constraints of music as we customarily think of it, and in which the visitor is invited to participate actively in the experience. The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random motion of atoms, a concept that resonates with the work’s inevitably changing and unpredictable nature. Each moment in the installation’s life is unique, offering a sensory and temporal experience that is constantly renewing itself.

The artist confronts the visitor with the immensity of a single moment in which time feels suspended. His work explores the boundary between art and the everyday. His repurposed objects, such as these bowls, are transformed into sophisticated instruments able to produce sounds without any human intervention..

The Bourse de Commerce becomes a space where we can lose ourselves in listening and contemplation, in which each spectator is invited to explore his or her own relationship to time and sound. With this installation, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot initiates a subtle dialogue between material, architecture, and the human presence. He creates an environment in which art is both an individual and a collective experience.

“The concentric vibrations on the surface of this blue expanse evoke a desire to grasp infinity within the enclosed space of the canvas, an aspiration shared by Miró in his Blue trilogy, Mark Rothko in his capturing of silence through his atmospheric glazes, and Monet in the way he endowed a fragment of a pond punctuated with white water lilies with a sense of infinity. But Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s work does not formalise a preexisting pictorial intention. It is instead the culmination of a compositional process that alone generates the form. We are familiar with Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s interest in the materials that he reconfigures to liberate objects from their usual functions. His approach is aligned with the aesthetic of detournement
inherited from Dada and Fluxus, which he revitalises. He also draws his inspiration from the DIY ethos that runs through the entire New York music scene, from punk to experimental music. From the 1980s onward, he has challenged the legacy of post-serial music, which he studied in school”.

— Emma Lavigne, exhibition curator, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection

Biography of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Born in 1961 in Nice, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot lives and works in Sète. His works, which have been exhibited in contemporary art spaces for the last thirty years, both in France and abroad, should be seen primarily as those of a musician. After being the composer for author and director Pascal Rambert’s company Side One—Posthume Théâtre from 1985 to 1994, Boursier-Mougenot began to give an independent form to his music by creating installations. Starting with the most diverse situations and objects, from which he extracts their musical potential, he develops systems that extend the notion of a musical score to the most heterodox configurations of the materials and media he uses to generate, usually as a live performance, forms of sound that he describes as alive. Created in resonance with the architectural and environmental features of the exhibition space, each system provides the ideal framework for a listening experience that, offered up to the visitor’s eyes and ears, reveals the process that generates the music.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Galerie Xippas in Paris, Geneva, Montevideo, and Athens, and the Mario Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin and Modena. His work has been exhibited at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2009, the Barbican Centre in London in 2010, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2013, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2015, SFMoMA in San Francisco in 2017, the Hab Galerie for Le Voyage à Nantes in 2018, for the inauguration of the Arter Museum of the Vehbi Koç Foundation in Istanbul in 2019, and for the opening of the new museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Langfang, China in 2021.