Starting on 6 June, with the curation of Emma Lavigne, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection, the artist Céleste Boursier- Mougenot is taking over the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce with his multisensorial installation entitled clinamen, which is being shown at an unprecedented scale, in resonance with the architecture of this site.

The Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection is embracing the colours of the summer season with clinamen, an aquatic and musical installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. This immersive project transforms the Rotunda into reverie space in which a basin 18 meters in diameter filled with water reflects the sky seen through the museum’s dome. White ceramic bowls float across this blue surface, generating melodious, enchanting sounds as a light current pushes them along. These acoustic vibrations, free of any inter vention by a performer, constitute the very heart of the piece, a veritable symphony of the moment that evolves with a flow of invisible waves...

This work forms part of a tradition in which sound becomes a living material freed of the constraints of music as we customarily think of it, and in which the visitor is invited to participate actively in the experience. The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random motion of atoms, a concept that resonates with the work’s inevitably changing and unpredictable nature. Each moment in the installation’s life is unique, offering a sensory and temporal experience that is constantly renewing itself.

The artist confronts the visitor with the immensity of a single moment in which time feels suspended. His work explores the boundary between art and the everyday. His repurposed objects, such as these bowls, which are transformed into sophisticated instruments able to produce sounds without any human intervention.

The Bourse de Commerce becomes a space where we can lose ourselves in listening and dream, in which each spectator is invited to explore his or her own relationship to time and sound. With this installation, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot initiates a subtle dialogue between material, architecture, and the human presence. He creates an environment in which art is both an individual and a collective experience.

The concentric vibrations on the surface of this blue expanse evoke a desire to grasp infinity within the enclosed space of the canvas, an aspiration shared by Miró in his Blue trilogy, Mark Rothko in his capturing of silence through his atmospheric glazes, and Monet in the way he endowed a fragment of a pond punctuated with white water lilies with a sense of infinity. But Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s work does not formalise a preexisting picto rial intention. It is instead the culmination of a compositional process that alone generates the form. We are familiar with Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s interest in the materials that he reconfigures to liberate objects from their usual functions. His approach is aligned with the aesthetic of detournement inherited from Dada and Fluxus, which he revitalises. He also draws his inspi ration from the DIY ethos that runs through the entire New York music scene, from punk to experimental music. From the 1980s onward, he has challenged the legacy of post-serial music, which he studied in school.

(Emma Lavigne, exhibition curator, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection)