FROM CLOUD TO CLOUD
Visual artist and researcher Marie-Luce Nadal hunts and enshrines clouds. The daughter of a long line of Catalan winegrowers, she draws inspiration from the ancestral tradition of "cloud hunters" firing rockets into the sky to protect harvests from hail. Armed with a crossbow and sulfur-based ammunition, she makes the clouds cry 1, at the blue hour, during that suspended moment at dusk when the birds stop singing. Documented in photos and videos, these poetic performances take place after a fencing duel. So many rituals marking the practice at the frontier of art and science of the artist-engineer who, since her first cloud-capturing machine (created in 2015), has been ingeniously cultivating the impalpable and manipulating the atmosphere.
Manipulating the atmosphere
Driven by a utopian dream, Marie-Luce Nadal captures cloud particles and electrical storm residues on her travels, reduces them to extracts and then encases them in "eoloriums" (cloud aquariums). These you can acquire by agreeing to maintain them (by supplying them with water).
"I wanted to give birth to a cloud in a box so that, at last, I could say that it's possible to play with clouds as one plays with fire", explains the artist who confronts us, if not with transcendence, at least with the human obsession for control and domination of the natural world. Housing "fragment[s] of imprisoned territory", "microcosm[s] subject to the random will of air masses condensing into volutes", these cloud aquariums are also, for the artist, a means of "capturing the ephemeral to protect it from the passage of time " 2 as we witness their metamorphosis, the cloud extracts, sensitive to light and temperature, constantly evolving and transforming.
1 - Title of an outdoor performance begun in 2015
A graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Montpellier (ENSAM) in 2009, then of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in 2012, Marie-Luce Nadal (b. 1984, Catalonia) also studied at PSL Research University (Paris Sciences & Lettres) in the laboratory of the École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie industrielle de Paris. She exhibited her Fabrique des Nuages in 2015 at the Palais de Tokyo and her video Faire pleurer les nuages in 2021 at the Institut français d'Helsinski. She also took part in the Novacène exhibition at the UTOPIA Lille 3000 festival in 2022.
"Celestial War - Marie-Luce Nadal
The Bach Royal Ice Rink
15, rue Veydt, Brussels (Belgium)
Until March 9, 2024
AND ALSO :
"Marie-Luce Nadal, A Summer of Celebrations" in "ART Situacions III".
Fiminco Foundation
43, rue de la Commune-de-Paris, Romainville
Until April 7, 2024
