Matthias Odin:

Entre le cœur et les murs

FRAC Ile-de-France

Paris, France

Matthias Odin draws inspiration from encounters and chance events that place his work in a state of wandering and construction that is as random as it is deliberate. His sculptures come to life through his daily experiences: discoveries of objects, places, or situations made while wandering the city alone, through friendships, and/or collective experiences. Each encounter leaves a material or immaterial and emotional memory that feeds into his composite installations, which bear witness to his mobility.

 

I contacted Matthias Odin in November 2024 and we scheduled a meeting at his studio in early January 2025. His email said: “I've found a space that I think would be interesting for presenting my work. It's currently a secret, but I can tell you that it's located at the Front Populaire metro station.” An image of a pristine, gleaming white space was included in the correspondence. A few days before, I received confirmation of the meeting at the Front Populaire metro station at 4 p.m. and was sent a poem to read on the way, which is now part of the exhibition. One of the sentences I read on the metro, Entre le cœur et les murs (Between the Heart and the Walls), is its title.

 

It was particularly cold that day. We crossed a vast paved square lined with shops and a large building constructed for the organization of the Olympic Games. To recount this discovery is to highlight the precarious nature of workspaces for artists (the LA gallery was evacuated less than two months after my visit during a group exhibition.) But it also draws attention to the practice of Matthias Odin, who, thanks to his occupation of this site, created a series of sculptures that he showed me that day. They all had the distinctive feature of having been composed of objects found on site. It was a very particular in situ work, accompanied by the fear and urgency of taking and occupying the space, and of not being spotted or discovered.

 

A few days later, still immersed in my visit, I suggested to Matthias Odin that we give this place another reality. The idea was to bring together some of the sculptures seen there to create an equivalence, a translation of this temporarily occupied space in the Plateau Project Room. So we worked together on this exercise to celebrate this studio located “between the heart and the walls,” and this aesthetic, emotional, and spatial position of being in between. The sculptures brought together for the exhibition proceed like the snowball described by Bergson in Creative Evolution, which grows as it rolls down a slope. Like our perceptions and states of mind, their assemblages thicken as they absorb time and take on multiple layers. What we believe to be stable is in fact already undergoing transformation, and the site itself acts on each sculpture with its tiny, daily changes. There is no break between one state and another; we are in the presence of a kind of continuum of absorption of space. The acts of collection are modest but precise, the materials are poor but the choices are right: filming, photographing, connecting a light bulb, placing a fake flower, observing the movement of an object, the recurrence of a graffiti 77/60. It is the dramaturgy of these minor acts of patient harvesting that translates the different states of the place.

 

By compacting the signs of life in this building and searching for traces of it, the question of its legibility arises. The omnipresent architecture disappears in places only to reappear in others: a wooden door, another made of glass, a window through which a film can be seen, partitions that can be walked through like the character in The Man Who Walked Through Walls, overturned chairs. And always this presence of the hand—hyperrealistic, ghostly, or mechanical—it is the hand that opens doors, provides access, triggers the photo or video, and it is also the hand that assembles and manufactures these small luminous theaters with drawers.

 

Light becomes an almost palpable material, sculpting space, revealing the invisible, and thus creating thresholds between the real and the imaginary. In its dialogue with darkness, it is a material for reflection on areas of oblivion and on that which escapes control. It is an act of reappropriation, a way of restoring visibility to what is supposed to remain hidden, ephemeral, illegal. It incorporates the scars of the place, its forgotten potential, and sometimes even the silent stories of the people who lived there or passed through.

 

The exhibition Entre le cœur et les murs (Between the Heart and the Walls) functions somewhat like a set of nesting dolls, with its multi-layered structure, reflexivity, and mise en abyme of the space, whose presence in the background remains an enigma, as does the exploratory movement of those who discover it. Through this attempt to exhaust the memory of a place in the Paris region, the exhibition offers a space for questioning our relationship to property and the right to exist poetically in the interstices of the city.

 

Maëlle Dault