objective: society

Edgar Sarin looks for new physical and semantic terrain by devising exhibitions that create themselves over their lifetime according to, and within, the very space in which they unfold. He compares them to robust systems, able to play by ear, to be open to contingency, to take on multiple historical layers and to perform any number of balancing acts between composition and improvisation. He is seeking an ecology of action, following a relatively consistent long-term process to lay the foundations of his propositions: the artist begins by creating a stock of simple, inexpensive, and close at hand materials such as oak, limestone or clay, that he will place in the space and allow to settle. Using these material conditions, and a deal of skill, Edgar Sarin imagines a self-sustaining system that sculpts itself and takes form until it reaches a certain degree of presence.  This way of working is political: he is part of a generation of artists who question the concept of the exhibition as an intrinsically sterile object. On the contrary, they profit from seeing it as a space that is sensitive to living rhythms; a site of displacement and of research into the immediate environment, that pays attention to collective harmony. His exhibitions are, therefore, fertile and progressively augmented structures whose theoretical and sensory depth can only really be fully felt at the end of being shown.

Éva Prouteau, art critic