At the center is matter. To its left, creativity—red—and to its right, method—black. Method fuels the system. It relies on numerous mechanisms—capital, performance, optimization, molds—all of which feed the machine together. In contrast, creation evokes a constellation, or a spider's web—interdependence. Neurons, plasticity, and truth are linked to the body. Caught within this opposition are all our impulses, fears, traumas, emptiness, lack, destruction, and chaos.

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Since her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Camille Sauer has played with the structures that surround us—political, economic, or social—dissecting them to reveal their threads, perhaps to untangle them and reweave them differently, together with her audience. The work is thus codified—even coded—and every visual element it contains carries meaning. Together, they form a network of signs—both clues and symbols. There is color, with red and black; form, with the circle and square; pyramidal or organic structures; fluidity or orthogonality. For about a decade, she has sketched these structures, named and articulated them on the pages of numerous notebooks, reinterpreting them repeatedly, making these meaningful diagrams the matrix of her work. For the first time, she presents these drawings as meta-architectures, or fundamental architectures—reflecting systems and all their rules, unveiling their many hidden mechanisms.

From these meta-architectures displayed on walls, Camille Sauer has created digital worlds, video game-like settings in which her avatar, or “reciprocal being”—her virtual alter ego—moves under our control. It is another way to enter the drawing, to penetrate the matrix of our world, and to explore its mechanisms through her, or rather with her. At the center of the room, a sound object also calls for audience involvement. As an artist-composer, Camille Sauer conceives of music as another way to embody structure—the sound object thus becomes an architecture, the incarnation of a system. By activating it, poetic speech is released, which is also political. Echoing these exploratory devices, Camille Sauer presents The Artistic Industry, an audiovisual opera that questions the artist's role within our society.

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In an alternative world inspired by hyper-structured architectural and industrial environments, the artist—through her avatar—is immersed within a productive industry, provoking the creation of new imaginaries through her narratives. At once a visual, poetic, and musical work, The Artistic Industry lies at the intersection of her practices in writing, composition, and image creation, drawing on her structural and political research to reveal the inner upheavals that can shape an artist’s early years.

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By deconstructing the rules and processes that govern our daily lives and revealing them through play, poetry, video, and drawing, Camille Sauer seeks a place for the artist within our cultural systems and, more broadly, a scope for creation itself. Through her inner journey, this solitary adventure within an ambiguous industry, she probes the very possibility of artistic encounter, of interference, and its effects on our perception of the world. It is here, perhaps, that the foundation of her work lies, and the reason her voice resonates with such particular significance today.

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Grégoire Prangé 

Lille, avril 2024