Since 2010, Estrid Lutz and Emile Mold have worked together to explore zones of friction in the hyper-present. Graduating with distinction from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, their works is the product of a violent over-layering of different levels of reality. Between the real and the virtual, man and machine, organic and synthetic, last century’s dreams of harmonious convergence have progressively disintegrated, giving way to shocks, crashes and the encroachment of unnatural hybrids where contradictory, conflicting registers temporarily coexist. Via installations that oppose various synthetic or found materials, clustering together carbon fibre, foam or security fencing like the nucleus of some infested organism, the duo transforms these frictions into a matrix. More recently, a new series of lenticular collages applies this logic to the world of images. Simultaneously static and in movement, these images change depending on the angle you view them from, seemingly spewing at random the visual memory of a glitching screen. Battered, sublime and tragic, bathed in a flickering and fleeting ambiguity, the works of Estrid Lutz and Emile Mold map the landscape of twenty-first-century emotion.

Ingrid Luquet-Ga