Pneumatica

76.4 / Brussels, 2022

Mark1

Mylar metalised, two motors, wood structure, LED lightings
280 x 200 x 50 cm (variable size)
Installation produced with the support of the Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles

On an invitation from 76.4, an artist run space consisting of a storefront window, Alec De Busschère proposes a sculpture occupying the entire volume of this space, that is to say 5.37m3. The custom-cut inflatable thus cancels the space, takes it over and makes it disappear. Connected to two motors and containing an armature shaped like a painting, "Pneumatica" forms and deforms itself more or less randomly, showing its mysterious activity to passers-by, 15 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Pneumatica is a machine that has no other purpose than to “machine”, to produce itself. Autonomous, celibate, it functions in freewheel even if not in free air. Pneumatica is a body whose primary life form is defined by its limits, by the possibilities it is given - a circumscribed environment, an external architecture as playground, an adequate surface membrane, an internal skeleton to keep it in place, an almost cardiac capacity for movement - its breath. Pneumatica is an entity, a body-machine.

Starting from this situation (its primordial soup), it unfolds and retracts, metamorphoses at its own pace, fragile but confident, it becomes in turn a rock painting or a bubble sculpture, in a silent staging made of comings and goings. It makes its own cinema, its own show, without having anything else to sell but its own free pleasure, its own absurd existence, its own necessity.

Pneumatica has settled there, embracing a vacant place for a given time, revealing and canceling it in the same movement, secretly training for a possible contamination, an overflow... au ciel, elle rêve.

Sarah Michel

Mark2