Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran is pleased to present Rien n’est moins sûr [Nothing could be less certain], a solo exhibition by French artist Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil. His work follows a line of discourse that often evokes Western society’s prevailing paranoia. For twelve years, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil has been examining the manifestations of safety concerns in the public space of developed countries. Often using a documentary format or miming a guided tour, his works show how exercising liberty in a democracy is increasingly circumscribed in a subtle fashion by protection and surveillance technologies.

As part of this exhibition, the artist is presenting When the paper…, a participative work that invites viewers to free themselves from their troubles. Inspired by a Japanese ritual from the Jishu sanctuary, it leads visitors to follow a path traced in a circle of soil. When they arrive at the centre, they find a table, a pail of water, and some small, white pieces of paper. A sign tells them: “When the paper dissolves in water, your troubles will be cleared up. 1 sheet: 200 Yen.” Visitors may write down any difficulties from which they wish to be freed on the papers and deposit them in the bucket, where they dissolve within seconds, taking with them an abandoned fragment of the inner self.

Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil will present I Will Keep A Light Burning at the Darling Foundry in Montreal during Nuit blanche on February 27, 2016. It is an outdoor performance made up of 500 candles that glow red, revealing the starry sky as it will look in a hundred years. Lit one after another throughout the night, the candles will cause a sky map of future constellations to gradually appear. This performance brings out three dimensions of time: the past, in following the tradition of sky mapping, the present, through the ephemeral nature of the installation, and the future, as the subject of the work.

Born in 1968, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil lives and works in Paris and Rome. Recipient of the Meurice Prize in 2013, his work was the subject of his first monograph in a French museum, at the Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, and was displayed at his first solo exhibition in Paris, at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, that same year. In 2006, he exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR) with a series of works entitled The Day Before and then in 2010 at La Maison des Arts de Malakoff (Paris, FR). His works are part of several Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain (regional art collections) in France, such as those of Pays de la Loire, Basse-Normandie, Bourgogne, and Languedoc-Roussillon, and they have been purchased by several institutions, including the Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne and the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou. He was an artist in residence at the Académie Française de Rome – Villa Médicis from 2009 to 2011. The artist’s work has been discussed in several specialized journals, like ArtPress, Arts Magazine, Slash Magazine, and Beaux Arts Magazine. In 2008, at VOX (Montreal), he participated in the exhibition Espace mobile, curated by Marie-Josée Jean and Patrice Loubier, and then in Lieux de passagein 2012 at Montreal’s ART SOUTERRAIN festival, with his work Black out.