A slight oscillation gathers the works of five artists, offering a glimpse on this curious partner called body. Michel Foucault, in his conference Le corps utopique (Utopian body) of 1966, describes it as a confinement, an "ugly shell of [his] head" in which utopias are born. The true utopia would be a place out of every place, where we would have a body without body, bright and clear. Here, in this dark place, the artists exhibit stranges objects revealing their own personal utopias. Hands, gloves, seconds skins, chair and cloak, shine in this ancient curiosity cabinet. The objects, organics and unusual, live in the same place and share among them.
The works of this exhibition tell the great gap between what happens within us and what happens in the vastness of the universe ; the power that emotions sometimes have, a shake almost imperceptible in the world. The body is a strange travel compartment and our relationships with others spread through it ; physical proximity is often the promise of emotional distance, and vice versa. Man escapes the body through dreams but it is the hands which make the artist. As Henry Focillon mentions in Eloge de la main (1934), a man dreaming cannot create for his hands are laying dormant "art is done by hands."
In his book A slight oscillation, Sylvain Tesson describes the daily work of a diarist as a possibility of saving itself from internal and external chaos. It is the same mechanism for the artists of this exhibition : create in order to smooth the inner effervescence.