Violence vitale

With Violence Vitale, Floryan Varennes continues his incantatory exploration of a rigged-out body. Whether augmented or impeded, this body is characterised making sure never to represent it by means of a process of metonymic suggestion, staking everything on finery. Based on rich academic erudition mixed with the imaginary worlds of esoterism and science fiction, the artist crystallises certain motifs, visual tropes and recurrent narratives. But although it a matter of a techno-body, it is also more broadly -like any other organism when hurled into the flow of evolution - that it must hold together growth and decline, reparation and aggression, negotiating doses between one and the other; and in line with the defnition of conatus, a key concept in Spinoza’s Ethics6, the aim of this is to “persevere in its being” and preserve or even increase its “power of existence”.